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Boasting the Attributes of Hybrid VigorFri, 18 May 2018 08:06:03 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://secure.gravatar.com/blavatar/1cb008c74ef7df92e73119e1d0530871?s=96&d=https%3A%2F%2Fs0.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngHyphenated-Republichttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com
The United Front Against Desley Brookshttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/the-united-front-against-desley-brooks/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/the-united-front-against-desley-brooks/#respondFri, 18 May 2018 02:08:39 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4981Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf launched her current assault against District 6 Council Person Desley Brooks, in April–ironically, in the midst of “honoring” the work of fellow council person Annie Campbell Washington. Washington announced she was retiring, setting the stage for Schaaf’s attack with a subsoundbite against “the corruption” at city council. Schaaf picked up the baton in a series of comments where she praised Washington’s brief term of service and compared Brooks–of all people–to Donald Trump.

But the attack on Brooks by the city establishment had started earlier–how much earlier really is only a function of how long an article one wants to write about it. In 2012, the SF Chronicle published a scoop about Brooks irregular use of funding to put a teen center in her district. The scandal that the Chronicle helped ignite around Brooks just happened to dovetail with then-City Administrator Deanna Santana’s vendetta to oust her, which was revealed when the city lost a whistleblower lawsuit to former city employee Lawana Preston. Preston claimed that Santana had pressured her to falsify reports about Brooks and the teen center; Preston, who worked closely with Santana, believed the attack was racially motivated.

Institutional attacks against Brooks know no term limits. Schaaf has been attacking Brooks since her days of sharing the half-round at the Oakland City Council. Schaaf publicly endorsed Brooks’ opponent in the 2014 District 6 election, who also happened to be Schaaf’s long-time aide, and was subsequently promoted to Schaaf’s mayoral Chief of Staff. Schaaf is currently endorsing one of Brooks’ challengers in the November election, while another of Brooks challenger is a former Schaaf mayoral aide and ally. With ranked-choice voting, this gives a Schaaf-associated candidate a very high chance of unseating Brooks. As mayor, Schaaf also seems to have access to the editorial boards of local newspapers, who always seem to be remarkably in lock-step with the mayor and city administrators vendettas against the District 6 Councilperson.

Brooks, of course, like any politician has a long career with many unsavory historical footnotes and they are worth investigating. Brooks, for example, was associated with an attempt to exempt the new Walgreens pharmacy development on Foothill and Bancroft in her district from the city’s living wage restrictions, which would have cost employees there nearly $2 an hour in pay. She has a pretty dicey record of illegally accepting campaign contributions. I’ve personally watched Brooks manipulate the process of discussion at the council to make it appear as if she opposes items that she actually votes for. I watched her do this during the E.12th parcel vote. When a shaky and not yet fully corrupted novice CM Abel Guillen made a motion to withdraw the sale under withering popular pressure, Brooks literally flung her body in front of the bullet, issuing a head-spinning counter-proposal to table and re-introduce the legislation later instead.

These actions, in fact, are Brooks incontrovertibly positive contribution to the Oakland City Council. She regularly agendizes Black Oakland. She critiques the process in which Oakland’s growing political and economic power is leaving Black and Brown Oaklanders in the rearview mirror. And she doesn’t do it apologetically. Its worth noting also that in each one of these issues mentioned above, Libby Schaaf as both mayor and council representative was on the other side of the issue–and in historical hindsight, many would agree, the wrong side.

The point isn’t, however, whether or not Brooks is an exemplary politician or nice person. The truth is subjective, but few would disagree that in the broad pattern of city politics, the title for most corrupt, insidious representative is up for grabs monthly–and furiously contested–in the Council chambers. It’s thus surprising that as Brooks seeks re-election in November, local papers seem obsessed only with Brooks to the exclusion of other council members.

Months before Schaaf’s flamboyant, and unprecedented attack, Brooks, was already being stalked by the San Francisco Chronicle. The paper published a series of puzzling articles, editorials and op-eds that created a narrative of corruption around Brooks’ legislative proposal for bond, tax and ticketing revenue to bolster Oakland’s job training centers. Brooks legislative proposal was notably the ONLY investigative reporting on Oakland politics that the Chronicle’s East Bay correspondent Kimberly Veklerov did from January to May.

And just a few days later, Robert Gammon, the generational editorial influence on the East Bay Express and Oakland Magazine, wrote a scathing editorial about Brooks, folding his long-simmering dislike of her into concern-trolling about the cost to taxpayers from Brown’s lawsuit. Gammon had also called for Brooks’ censure in 2013. The Express editorial board–a body that is literally composed of Gammon–endorsed Schaaf enthusiastically for mayor in 2014. In this context, it’s also of some value to compare Gammon’s remarkably tender critique of Schaaf for her role in the cover up of statutory rape by OPD of a minor here, with the tone and invective of his words against Brooks.

All of these institutional editorial attacks occurred within weeks of the Chronicle’s first salvo on Brooks’, throughout January and the first days of February, 2018, starting a unified and exclusive pile-on that continues to today, in May and will probably proceed to November.

One could argue that editorial boards have the right to back or deny whatever they like. And though that’s a tired argument, it’s not really what’s at issue here. Even if Brooks was the worst council member in the history of cities, these papers–and its fair to say that they are the entirety of mainstream print news sources in the Bay Area–didn’t bother with basic ideas of journalistic fairness and rigor in their attacks on Brooks, or their reporting on her accusers.

In her reporting on Brooks’ legislation in the Chronicle, for example, Veklerov repeatedly noted the city attorney’s investigation of the legality of Brook’s proposal, strongly implying that Brooks was breaking laws and taking kickbacks in the shadows of city hall. Doubtlessly, Brooks broke no laws, and did not even violate city council protocol in introducing legislation to divert funds from city revenues and public bonds to job centers for Oakland residents. The city attorney’s vetting is part and parcel of the legislative process, and it’s not uncommon for a piece of legislation to head into chambers with the opinion that some parts of it could be unlawful. That of course is what amendments and discussion are for on the floor–i.e., its not unlawful until its voted in, and if that’s the case, then the unlawful actions are shared by the council, not just by the author of the legislation.

That all of this is common sense, escaped the Chronicle, which continued the attack even as the legislation was amended to remove the most controversial language. In an extremely manipulative move, the Chronicle published a photo from last year of City Attorney Barbara Parker giving a press conference to accompany the story on the day of the vote, with the headline “Desley Brooks’ funding proposal partly illegal, Oakland city attorney says”. It’s reasonable to say that the two elements were designed to inflate the importance of the dispute and imply criminality on Brooks’ part.

When the amended proposal was heard in council on the 15th, Veklerov overlooked the opportunity to illustrate Brooks’ argument that the City Attorney’s opinion of the modified proposal was not rooted in law. Veklerov ignored the on the floor discussion between Brooks and the Deputy City Attorney, who was forced to admit he could not produce a code or law that the legislation violated (for a rough sketch of the conversation between Brooks and the City Attorney, see my tweets about it, unfortunately the only evidence it happened in print ).

In the end, it was clear that the City Attorney’s remaining criticism was that the proposal would end-run the city’s Workforce Development Board, the membership of which is appointed exclusively by the Mayor. It’s notable that a much more critical piece of legislation was up for a vote on the same day as Brooks’, as the city sought to sell public land to a charter school, despite the fact that the OUSD had never been consulted and had vehemently condemned the sale as detrimental to funding and education of Oakland youth. Though it was reported by the East Bay Express, not one word appeared in the Chronicle or the East Bay Times, though issues of legality and protocol were definitely foremost.

Obviously, the Brooks and Brown scuffle itself is worth a story, but its outsized character is only due to the multi-million dollar cash judgement that was initially awarded to Brown. It was clear from the moment the award was determined by the jury that the judge intended to reduce it, and ultimately did, though it was scarcely reported by local journalists and it was buried under further smears that Brooks had lied under oath. This is the way East Bay Times reporter Thomas Peele buried the lede in his tweet up of the piece which reported the reduction of the judgement.

Regardless of the relevance of the Brooks-Brown suit, the media’s silence on the vast amount of cash business Elaine Brown has before the city in the context of the lawsuit reporting can only be seen as bad journalism. The Chronicle and East Bay Times were the worst offefnders, but Gammon needlessly pulled the East Bay Express along behind him to join in.

All in all, this is around 2 million dollars of grants and land that the city awarded Brown through an exclusive negotiating agreement. In May 2018, after the city had given Brown the land and money, the city allowed Brown to change the non-profit affordable housing developer tied to the initial plan, to a for-profit developer known for creating market rate heavy “affordable housing” projects in other cities. This amazing–and remarkably under-reported–largesse occurred while Brown sued a council member that the Mayor and other council members have publicly stated vendettas against.

To its credit, the East Bay Express did good reporting on these issues in mid 2017 when the sale came before the council. That makes the actions of Editor Gammon even more glaring. Gammon rallied for Brown’s censure and removal from committees in his paper and on twitter based on the Brown-Brooks scuffle–but in that editorializing, Gammon never mentioned his own papers’ reporting less than a year previous that depicted Brown’s relationship with the city as troubling and irregular.

But the opprobrium in the reporting on Oakland politics seems to be exclusive to Brooks this year, and seems to synchronize with the city political establishment’s election agenda perfectly. Whether that’s because there’s collusion between them, or that its institutional racism, or that both ultimately have the same boss, is for a real journalist to investigate.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/05/17/the-united-front-against-desley-brooks/feed/0OmooexsrfwerewGamon Twitter Brookspartly illegalpeeleThe Ghosts of the Miller Library: the city of Oakland conspired to keep a historic building blighted and useless. But who paid the price, and who benefitted?https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/the-ghosts-of-the-miller-library-the-city-of-oakland-conspired-to-keep-a-historic-building-blighted-and-useless-but-who-paid-the-price-and-who-benefitted/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/the-ghosts-of-the-miller-library-the-city-of-oakland-conspired-to-keep-a-historic-building-blighted-and-useless-but-who-paid-the-price-and-who-benefitted/#respondMon, 26 Mar 2018 22:35:45 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4961I’ve been involved with the Miller Library building at 15th st. and Miller Ave for about six years. It started with a major spectacle event where I and many community members took over the building in 2012. We filled it with books and created a day long people’s fair around the building. That day, kids from the neighborhood started a garden on the grounds with some junk wood found on the corner. After we got kicked out of the building by OPD, we continued to fill those garden boxes with plants and vegetables. There were years when i went to the site, which we called the Biblioteca Popular, every day. But as any long-term project, it had its ups and downs, mostly caused by the city creating obstacles for full community participation.

There was a core group of neighbors involved in the community space on the grounds, and we kept at it as long as we could. By 2016, we stopped referring to our efforts as an organized group, and we stopped actively trying to recruit new members. That was because a group of people had taken over the building, and they had their own way of doing things. We could no longer guarantee the kind of environment kids and families had enjoyed in previous years. Kids used to be able to come and learn a couple of things about plants, and do a little work and have a bit of fun; people could do food giveaways and pick up food when they were hungry; there were greens year round to supplement people’s food stocks. That was gone. We couldn’t guarantee any of that anymore, and it probably wasn’t coming back without a major overhaul of the economic and racist realities of that neighborhood. We didn’t feel like we could in good conscience keep asking people to join, knowing that and so we stopped.

I stepped back, but it never ceases to please me that the neighbors most attached to the space didn’t. These were mostly women and families who’d lived and grown up in the neighborhood for decades. They kept the garden up, and even planted new crops, and whenever I went by to check on things, or to do a bit of support work, the place still looked alive, though, unfortunately pretty run down.

Of course, part of that decline was because of the environment I was talking about earlier, and that was definitely caused by the indifference of a city that barely even knew the area existed until a few years ago when they discovered you can gentrify the Murder Dubs. But some of it was a result of the decisions made by Noel Gallo, the district council person for that area of the East.

Around 2014, Gallo, despite his current disguise as a people’s politician, had been a law and order jack off for the first two years of his term. Gallo’s first major move in office was to suggest a youth curfew, where school playgrounds would become literal youth prisons. Even the police chief thought that was ridiculous and it failed. Gallo looked like a prize asshole who didn’t reflect the needs and wants of his district for a minute. So over the years, Gallo has picked up a trick or two about how to appear less Stalin and more Che, and one of these gimmicks has been his weekly trash clean ups.

Sure, in theory, these are welcome and that’s why he’s doing it. Dumping has been a major problem for that area of Oakland, as it is elsewhere to lesser degrees, and so a politician coming out on weekends seemingly doing the work himself with a cadre of volunteers looked pretty cool. But Gallo cut corners. In order to be able to pick up trash without extra public works support, Gallo directed his volunteers to dump in front of the Miller Building, in fact, right in front of the garden, for weekly pick ups. Because the city council person for the district was okaying this, the space became a free fire zone for dumping. Dumpers no longer even bothered to come at night anymore, they just dumped freely during the day. Why not, an elected official was doing it.

Even though neighbors complained constantly to me and to him about this (and as you can see, fruitlessly to public works), Gallo never stopped, and no official ever called him on the dubious legality of this get out the vote activity, though the neighborhood complained constantly. This has been Gallo’s way of interacting with that neighborhood, which by any measurement, he really doesn’t value. He never asked people if they were good with turning the corner into a free dumping zone, he just did it and ignored people who lived there when they complained. Gallo never supported the garden, and even smeared it when he had the chance, despite the fact that it was the only positive thing that happened in that space in the three decades the city has overseen the Miller Building Blight Zone.

In 2014, despite having spoken to neighbors while they gardened on the Miller Grounds, and during a time when there was absolutely no squatting going on in the building, Gallo brought this to the Rules Committee.

The fire that burned a good portion of the upper floors and roof of the building in April 2017 was, in fact, the second time the fire department had been called out to extinguish a fire there. The first fire in 2016 was minor, and might even have been people trying to get a non-functioning fireplace working. The neighborhood by then had an abundance of caution about fires, the building adjacent to the Miller Building had burned to the ground the previous year, and the year before that, the entire neighborhood had been subjected to an arson spree which damaged several cars, property and a house down the street. So, it wasn’t a surprise the OFD was called in.

The activity cleared out the squatters for a bit, and that same night, public works came to “secure” the building. I went by there in the ensuing days to check on the garden. There had been very little impact on it, and so I was relieved to see that the neighbors could go on with their work there. I also had the opportunity to take a look at the “security” of the building. The bars that had been placed in the facade decades ago had been crumbling for years, and they had been easily removed by the squatters the year before when they started commandeering the place. When PWA secured the building after this first fire, they simply put up plywood, bolted into the same crumbling exterior over the windows. Within three or so days, I noted the bars had been pulled off. The city never came by to “resecure” the building, they never checked on their work and the building was quickly back in business.

The second fire in 2017 was predictable, but the city did the same inadequate “securing”. But this time, the city also moved to destroy our garden and evict it permanently from the grounds. I can see what you are thinking: if the city had put its efforts into bolstering the garden and allowed the community to use the grounds as a free space and park, it would have gone much farther to discourage squatting. At least in hindsight, that’s obviously the case. But nope, the city didn’t do that.

The city’s public works dropped a gigantic container where our book house used to be, and we had to beat the clock to prevent them from simply trampling our garden into oblivion. It was during this time that the city of Oakland’s risk manager contacted us through our mostly defunct Facebook page, giving us three days to take everything we wanted to save, as they claimed remediation efforts now necessitated the entire area where we’d had our garden and rain water collection efforts.

Deborah Grant, the city’s Risk Manager, contacted the Biblioteca Popular facebook page to tell us that not only would the site be fully renovated with the insurance money, but that we could expect community meetings going forward on the designation of the building.

As we tried to work out a way to save the garden, the risk manager assured us that the garden would now become superfluous. She told us the city was expecting a fire insurance payout guaranteed to adequately refurbish the building to its former standard. Thats where they left the matter officially with us. PWA were likely going to destroy the garden to clear the way for this community-based building. As they say in Arabic, yati kalafi–we could just take a victory lap and go home.

We didn’t accept this, and went to every city agency and office we could, letting them know that WE had been the only people who’d cared for this space for three decades. It seemed like that worked, at least the city didn’t destroy the garden as they’d claimed they were going to.

But that wasn’t the end of the story. The city put obstacles in our way. The contractor the PWA hired to do the preliminary debris removal covered the fencing and building in signs that warned of asbestos, though, as is clear in this recording, the contractor admitted it was a false claim designed to keep people away from the building. I later spoke to an environmental engineer who was doing active asbestos monitoring with a special device on the grounds, and he also told us there was no asbestos.

The city later covered over the mural which CRP had painted for us, and the artwork that children from the neighborhood had done over the years. But one thing the city never did was properly secure the building. The workers were gone in a week or two, and the same plywood that could be ripped off the walls with bare hands was placed over the windows, and it was gone a day or two after the workers left. Noel Gallo stayed dumping in front of the space.

The garden continued tho, and even a couple of new neighbor’s became involved. We never heard about the insurance money again. I assumed it was bullshit, and a way for the city to get rid of us. Keeping a rotting hulk of a building away from positive use seemed to be the only equation the city was interested in.

The third fire in February 2018 wasn’t a surprise to anyone who lived nearby. I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to certify victim-blaming. But I also want to point out that many people in that neighborhood who are Black and Brown are hanging by the barest of threads. They are precariously employed. They’re living one and two and three to a room, while rents are rising quickly in a neighborhood that used to be the last stop for folks being pushed out of the west and north. They’re oppressively-policed, but the police don’t come very quickly when they need help. So, the issues with drugs and stability in that hood are real and ever-looming, swallowing people when they are low, or suddenly dirt poor and unemployed, taking their kids before they have created a structure of judgement for themselves, turning the area into a huge dumping ground.

These issues aren’t the fault of the people who already fell victim to them, but one can’t ignore how these process work once they’ve been put in motion either, nor devalue the importance of creating a safe space for the people who are holding on for dear life. That’s what the Biblioteca Popular was supposed to be about, giving people an open space to wrestle with these issues and help themselves. But the city put every obstacle in the way of doing that, and a lot of that was through aggressive policing which scared away wider community participation very early on. Gallo’s dumping regime and the lack of support we received at every level of city activity didn’t help, either.

The February fire was the worst. Both the grounds and the building were left a total loss. I had already pretty much given up on the space by then. I wished people the best, but had my own issues that needed intense attention. So the final fire wasn’t as big a shock as I might have thought several years ago. I arrived to watch the building consumed, but felt little more than resignation–the sentence for the space had been pronounced by the city many years ago. The real surprise was that it had taken this long.

While I was standing on the block, at least two journalists I talked to told me that Gallo had cornered them while the fire was still burning, already trying to finger people for the fire and billing it as arson. I told some journalists to follow-up with Gallo about the insurance money and that’s why that question was even asked to my knowledge. Gallo was forced to admit that the insurance money had been paid out to the city, but somewhere along the way, it had been allocated elsewhere.

I mean, during this period when they were throwing that money into a deep hole, probably paying off OPD’s overtime, the city was doing its best to make sure the garden disappeared. But remarkably, they had no plan at all for the building except to just let it sit there and rot. Of course, while Gallo was pointing the finger at everyone else that day, he told the latest tall tale about how the city had found a buyer for the building. This story of a buyer who’d just expressed interest was reborn whenever any scrutiny of the city’s self-inflicted blight got any public attention after Biblioteca Popular began. There was always a buyer for the building just around the corner any time a journalist asked about it for the entire six years I was involved with the site.

The undeniable reality is that the city could have sold the building in 2004; there was only 500k of renovation necessary then to bring it up to code.

The city issued this estimate in 2001. At the time, the minimum investment for the city would have been around 500k. The other figures are optional; the city would not have had to do those to bring it up to its own code.

But they didn’t. The city could have alternately invested the money itself, and sold it then–they may have even found a buyer who wanted to put the work in and abide by the historical status restrictions. But they didn’t even try.

By the time the city put the building up for sale in 2009, it had already been squatted several times, the pipes had burst and flooded lower levels, further damaging the place and adding wear and tear. The city could never have sold the building in the condition we found it in 2012; it already needed substantial work along with the initial repairs that the city should have done in the 90’s. Thats why Gallo’s predecessor Ignacio de la Fuente, started the yearly tradition of lying about the Miller building by claiming it was condemned. Gallo continued the tradition by falsely claiming it would cost ten million dollars to renovate. They did this to escape responsibility for their and the city’s own mismanagement.

By 2018, after two fires and years of abuse there was just no way anyone was going to buy the Miller Building. Even offering it for free would have been a challenge. As a historical building, the structure coud not be torn down until it had been deemed a total loss. And anyone who bought the building had to return it to its original state and spend about a million dollars in repairs. Nevertheless, Gallo told journalists on the day of the final fire that he had, surprisingly, yet another buyer lined up before the unfortunate event.

In the aftermath of the third fire, now that the building is a total loss, there are many unanswered questions. There’s the question of the insurance money, which has been unofficially pegged at 1.5 millon dollars. Where did it go and how? Who authorized that process and was it legal?

The city must offer its surplus real estate for purchase to Alameda County organizations and non-profit agencies before it puts them out for public sale according to city rules, and that was apparently done in 2009 according to a public records request. But why then did the city go through the same process again, offering it to ALCO agency purchase in February 2018 as if it had never met this requirement? And why, incredibly, was this done only 48 hours before the fire?

Noel Gallo’s wife, Aliza Gallo, is a highly placed administrator in the Economic and Workforce Development Office of the city of Oakland, which oversees the city’s Real Estate agency–has she been influencing Gallo’s actions around the building and neighborhood? It’s not a stretch, in fact, to wonder if the city’s neglect, as focused through Noel Gallo, has been in an effort to hasten the destruction of the building, so that it can be called a total loss and the land sold to developers. Given Gallo’s odd behavior around the building, its worth asking if he or his wife stand to gain personal benefit from such a sale.

As we prepare ourselves for the city’s decision on how the building and land will be used going forward, these seem like extremely important questions. But the media and officials aren’t asking them.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/03/26/the-ghosts-of-the-miller-library-the-city-of-oakland-conspired-to-keep-a-historic-building-blighted-and-useless-but-who-paid-the-price-and-who-benefitted/feed/0Omooex1176405_546467468735598_1018034054_ngallo complaint 1gallo complaint 2gallo rules and legislation video 2gallo 3deborah grant 1Beeb1citys engineersmiller saleThe Killmonger Compromise: How a CIA Agent and a Black Revolutionary Combine Forces to Preserve the Status Quo in Marvel’s Black Pantherhttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/the-killmonger-compromise-how-a-cia-agent-and-a-black-revolutionary-combine-forces-to-preserve-the-status-quo-in-marvels-black-panther/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2018/02/22/the-killmonger-compromise-how-a-cia-agent-and-a-black-revolutionary-combine-forces-to-preserve-the-status-quo-in-marvels-black-panther/#commentsFri, 23 Feb 2018 01:03:56 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4939There don’t seem to be many spoilers left to give away for Black Panther. Almost everyone in the universe has seen the film who had even a mild interest, and those who haven’t seem happy to throw down in the Killmonger was wrong-right dialectic its spawned. So, spoiler alert, if you are bothered about that kind of thing still, spoilers abound going forward:

_______________________________________________Like many viewers with a general awareness of recent African history, I was shocked quite early on in Black Panther by an inscrutable bit of dialogue. T’chala tells his escort that he has “spotted an old friend who works for the CIA”. The agent, Everett Ross, played by legendary second-fiddle Martin Freeman, turns out to be a major character. Ross, in fact, plays a significant white-savior role all the way to the end of film and has a heroic arc comparable to the Wakandan supporting characters.

The CIA’s destabilizing role in Africa is no secret. Viewers with even a passing knowledge of African history–the type that Black Panther seemed to want to attract–will know about the CIA covert ops like the assassination of Patrice Lumumba in Congo and the overthrow of Kwame Nkruma in Ghana (and many more). Thus, it feels odd to see the woke Black Panther we have been hearing so much about referencing a CIA agent so casually. Ryan Coogler’s choice of the CIA as the home for Ross’ character is even more mystifying because of how gratuitous it seems to be. With Marvel’s penchant for inventing interconnecting networks of acronymic intelligence agencies–ARMOR, SHIELD, SWORD, HAMMER–to name a few, Coogler had a range of fake agencies that would’ve gotten across the same relationship. Even weirder, though Ross is an artifact from the comic-book source material, he’s not a a CIA agent there, but a state department diplomat and liaison to Wakanda.

Like the Killmonger-arc and other details in Coogler’s Black Panther, the Ross character was developed in Christopher Priest’s 90’s reboot of the Black Panther. Ross was, in fact, a specifically chartered device for Priest’s story-line, not an accident or walk-on. As Priest once noted, white-led Marvel was responsible for most of the editorial decisions in his enduring retcon of Black Panther. Priest was one of few Black comic book writers at the time, but still saw very little reason to try to appeal to Black audiences, erroneously believing in pre-social media days, that there was no significant Black audience for comics. Priest believed that BP was off-putting to white readers, and so he created Ross as a point of reference for them.

Priest’s Wakanda wasn’t much different than Marvel’s previoius iterations. Its always been a normative class-striated technocracy and monarchy where wealth and power are embedded in the royal family–but always seen a bit distantly and rarely from the pov of the average Wakandan. In Priest’s Wakanda, it makes perfect sense that Panther has a first-world to first-world relationship with the US. He’s a monarch, he believes in monarchy, he’s arrogant and strident. Likewise, Priest’s Black Panther avoided issues of Black empowerment in the United States. For almost the entirety of Black Panther’s existence, in fact, its been a book about a Black man with super powers, not Black people or Africa–and certainly not African-Americans.

This is where most of the first half of the Black Panther film enjoyably parted company with the source material. When we meet King T’Chala, he reigns over a mellow super-kingdom, an Asgard for Black people, full of wonders and harmony and good-feels. Coogler’s African kingdom has advanced technology and industrialization cohabitating with subsistence level villages and traditional market plazas. The cinematic Wakanda has more in common with Star Trek’s idealized–but impossible to economically define–neo-artisinal future societies where people grow grapes for wine that no one drinks and live in palatial estates. When we do see some political discord, its only from Luddites who have no popular support. And though Wakanda doesn’t consider the US an enemy, it has no aid or diplomatic relations to speak of with any country.

Given how fantastic the nation is, even the fact that Wakanda gives no aid to neighboring states and won’t take in refugees, as Nakia notes, is not a deal-breaker. I mean, this is a superhero movie. If you want to be real, you know that most white people in Peter Parker’s Queens neighborhood–Aunt May included–would dial 911 in a heartbeat if T’chala was walking down their street in plain clothes. Black Panther shouldn’t be called on to shoulder the entire narrative of colonial aggression in Africa. After Blade, BP is the only Black superhero who actually lives in the same world as the all-white Avengers, and the film is–and should feel like–a long-overdue Black Star Wars.

But then the coming of Erik Killmonger really throws all this fantasy world to holy hell and not just in plot terms. Up to the point where we discover T’Chaka’s closet full of skeletons, its been good fun in African spaceships and super-cars. But Killmonger is far too real to enjoy as a fantasy. The very real reality of Killmonger–whose father was radicalized by the brutality of systemic white supremacy–while initially only a bit of a pause from the fun, becomes the central gyre which begins to rip apart the ideal magic kingdom.

Of course, that’s the role Killmonger is supposed to play as an antagonist. But given the subject matter, Killmonger presents many ideological problems for Coogler’s story-telling and his arc would have been an unprecedented feat of anti-racist, white-audience scaring narrative if Coogler had pursued it honestly. Coogler did in fact craft some satisfying scenes for the villain played by Michael B. Jordan. Killmonger’s spirit-quest under the effects of the heart-shaped herb and his poignant death speech recalls some of Coogler’s best work in Creed and Fruitvale Station. Killmonger also powerfully ruminates on the emotional trauma and damage that come from a lifetime under white supremacy. And the broad strokes of Killmonger’s revolutionary liberation movement, not just for the pan-African diaspora, but also as he clearly states, “oppressed people all over the world” is truly something else. Going to a Marvel movie, I’ve never felt that any superhero or villain gave a shit about Palestinian liberation until Erik Killmonger. To say this is one of the few thrilling and viscerally resonant scenes I’ve ever experienced in a movie doesn’t do it justice.

Perhaps this is why Coogler undercuts Killmonger’s much more politically and emotionally satisfying arc, with his CIA construct. We hear Killmonger’s origin story from the mouth of CIA agent Ross, who transfers all the agencies real-world sins on the continent and the developing world to JSOC. To be sure, Ross briefly links Killmonger’s former JSOC squad to his own agency, but he never uses the word “we”. Rather, it’s they, again and again, in reference to Killmonger’s JSOC, “destabilizing foreign countries…striking during election years and deaths of monarchs…committing assassinations and taking down governments”. Ross’ own history in the CIA, given his age and purview on Africa, remain beyond critique. And despite Killmonger’s repeated claim that he is using the enemy’s strategies against them, we never see so much as an impolite comment from Ross or his Western masters.

Coogler goes further, revealing Killmonger to be a psychotic, violent, would-be imperialist. Killmonger is portrayed as self-absorbed and narcissistic. His rhetoric of liberation is revealed to be a sham as he torches the Panther-serum garden so that there can be no other super-liberators. It seems especially important to Coogler, given the film’s nod to Black empowered women, to give Killmonger’s violence a misogynist bent. There are several scenes where Killmonger smiles broadly while enacting extreme brutality on a female character– slitting the throat of a Dora Milaje warrior, then moving on, beaming, in an attempt to kill Shuri, T’Chala’s sister. In fact, whenever he is about to kill a female character, Coogler has Killmonger’s mask dissolve to show, bizarrely, his wide grin. Coogler deliberately portrays Killmonger as indifferent to the lives of Wakandans, and to even his own romantic partner, killing white, Black, friend or foe with equal relish.

Though Ta Nahisi Coates’ Panther narrative has little to do with the film adaptation in the details, Coogler may have looked there for ideological cues, as the rebellion against the monarchy in Coates’ story is exposed as the same sort of delusionally messianic violence and power-thirst. Like Coates, Coogler, conveniently relegates the idea of revolution to the ravings of emotionally-damaged lunatics.

A scene from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther comic, where the state’s greatest dissident chastises the revolutionaries.

And with the failure of revolutionary discourse, the question of Wakanda’s responsibility to the subjugated is left to T’Chala’s own brand of neo-liberalism. The Wakandan king takes Nakia’s critiques of isolationism and resource-hoarding and answers them with the US state department’s concepts of aid and charity. T’Chala gobbles up real estate for his Wakanda foundation initiative in West Oakland, with the intent of creating an ambassadorial green zone. T’chala appears before a mostly white UN analogue and offers to share vibranium powered technology with the very nations Killmonger excoriated as oppressors, and there’s no way to miss a specifically-placed beat for CIA agent Ross, smugly nodding with satisfaction from the back row. Neoliberal Wakanda thus joins the “world” by assuming the rhetoric of a patron state, leaving its class and capital lines intact. Even Zakia’s most salient IRL critique, Wakanda’s failure to take in and house African refugees, goes unanswered.

All of this would be far easier to tolerate, had Black Panther not been the subject of corporate stoked and facilitated viral marketing from Marvel, whose parent-company is the insidious Disney. Seemingly organic (but not) fund-raisers to take Black and poc children to the premiere sold Black Panther as a cultural touch-stone to Africa. But its all the more cynical, given that the lesson the film teaches is the erasure of Africa’s recent history and the US’s involvement in it. With the marketing in mind, Ross’ oddly outsized role in the film makes depressing sense–Ross was the answer to Marvel’s fear about Black Panther’s potential to alienate white audiences. Just as Priest specifically created Ross as a bridge for white readers, Ross appears in Coogler’s film to dilute the idea of Wakanda as an anti-Western fantasy. Killmonger plays a joint role, to enact the spectacle of the failure of autonomous revolution and anti-authoritarianism, leaving only King T’Chala’s top-down liberal discourse to answer the very real problems that the film poses, and that everyone already knows about.

Its arguable that Coogler’s film would have been more strictly enjoyable and far less politically disappointing, if he had simply struck to the apolitical magical kingdom, giving Black and poc audiences the Asgard, Galaxy Far Away and Hogworts denied for so long. And to a large extent Black Panther does this, and I enjoyed it for that reason. But in creating a Black hero that could appeal to white audiences, Coogler had to split the difference between a Black America increasingly losing patience with white supremacy and a white America vested in the status quo. The heavy-lifting super-constructs of Killmonger and Ross may well have been his attempt at an ideological compromise.

Marvel created buzz by baiting growing resistance to white supremacy, but balancing that corporate equation necessitated that the narrative take steps to preserve it, perhaps even against Coogler’s wishes (one hopes). Because the arc of the Marvel Universe bends toward whiteness, law, order and capital, a superhero that didn’t in some way champion them would functionally be a super-villain. This visceral truth, as projected through the flawed vessel of Killmonger, remains Black Panther’s only honest, if accidental, take on the real world of American racism.

The SPLC’s “Return of the Violent Black Nationalist” article, dated August 08, 2017 and the “Black Identity Extremist” report from the FBI, dated August 3. The FBI report would not be released to the public until October, 2017

The Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center were two ancient orgs slumping into the horizon with barnacled hulls and weather-beaten jackets, when antifascist fever took off around 2015. ADL’s rep as a right-wing organization that had spied on left of center organizations and Black political groups for years was common knowledge. Most of the ADL’s work from the 80’s onward was in ideological defense of Israeli colonial projects and violence, and cynical inflation and ‘tracking’ of anti-Semitism. These attacks had a single purpose, which was to create arguments for the critical importance of Israel, and vindication for Israel’s crimes against Palestinians and other Arab and Muslim targets by inference. By this time, no one on the Left actually believed the ADL’s mission was to combat anti-semitism.

Overnight, beginning in 2015, the start of Greenblatt’s tenure, the ADL returned to mainstream journalism’s white supremacy sourcing a-list. The ADL’s Center for Extremism was welcomed back to hipper mags like TeenVogue for adding Pepe to its database of hate symbols. In The Verge, the ADL was celebrated for reclaiming the formerly beloved Pepe for millenials along with the character’s creator.

Often the rationale for citing the ADL on any particular issue of white supremacist organizing is slim to non-existant, a reality proven by quick googling which reveals all the information being tasked to the ADL is available through regular reporting by mainstream papers of record. This was especially true for the reporting on Arthur Jones, a famed neo-nazi with many years of self-promoting hucksterism on the electoral stage. Despite dozens of articles in mainstream newspapers having been written about Jones’ neo-nazi efforts for decades, newsites still sought quotes from the ADL, which did little but re-cast reporting published as recently as 2016 as a function of its “expertise”.

The status-factor that has become associated with an ADL citation, however, has promoted few processes of accountability for the ADL, even in its strictly “white supremacist” research. With very little research at all, and in the midst of the media frenzy surrounding the mass shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School by a former student in February, the ADL rushed to report that the shooter was linked to a tiny neo-nazi organization located hundreds of miles away in Florida.

The claim was based solely on the claim of Jordan Jereb, the founder and likely only committed member of Republic of Florida. Despite the ADL’s fame in white supremacy research, the organization did no due-diligence to back up the claims of the well-known self-promoter Jereb, and reported them within 12 hours of the massacre. There was little downside for the ADL’s rush to report, because, after all, few mainstream and leftist reporters ever bother to question the ADL’s expertise in the first place.

Nevertheless, the ADL continues its role as anti-Islamic and anti-Palestinian hate-monger and fabulist, with renewed credibility. This has included attacking Keith Ellison when he was in the running for DNC chair, based on his pro-Palestinian views. Nothing changed for the ADL’s main mission of smothering pro-Palestinian activism and rhetoric whenever it surfaced. Indeed, in the same week journalists on the antifascist beat were seeking a status-based quote from the ADL on Atomwaffen, the ADL was bullying the New Orleans city council into rescinding a pro-human rights/BDS proclamation. Regardless, the ADL perversely continues to be a main source of “research” on extremism for both papers of record and the anti-fascism activists who use these reports and mainstream reporting to bolster their claims about the growth of the alt-right.

Though the SPLC doesn’t have the ADL’s sordid legacy of outright bigotry, it has been associated with a more insidious shell-game. The SPLC began as the brainchild of Morris Dees and Joe Levin. But Dees, far more even than Foxman/ADL, has been the guiding hand of the SPLC since its inception, creating a burgeoning and successful charity organization that in 2015 raised 50 million dollars. Questions about the SPLC’s methodology and goals dogged the organization for years, especially its habit of threat-inflation and raising far more money than it required for operations. Dees himself is a problematic figure, who became rich through direct-marketing and turned to civil rights causes long after the civil rights movement’s heyday.

Clearly, the line between self-enrichment and the public good may have always been a bit blurry to Dees. Deborah Ellis, now the director of the NYU’s Public Law Center quit the SPLC in the 80’s, because of what seemed to be Ellis’ cash-motivated pursuit of the largely moribund KKK, “I felt that Morris was on the Klan kick because it was such an easy target — easy to beat in court, easy to raise big money on.” Indeed, the SPLC has always liked soft-targets, and these soon ranged out of no-brainers like the KKK. Ironically, the SPLC even targeted anarchists, implying that they were being unknowingly recruited into neo-nazi cadres through radical Black Block activities, during the WTO demonstrations in Seattle.

But with the waning of the organizations influence, legitimate concerns and critique—especially from the radical left—also faded. Indeed, one of the most difficult challenges for researching the SPLC is the force-field the org has created from left-leaning scrutiny, given the character of its focus. There’s a lot of right-wing criticism of the SPLC motivated by, yes, a soft-spot for white supremacy, and its become difficult to adequately judge the org without appearing to be joining in. The many smarmy racist critiques of the SPLC smother due-diligence criticism from the Left. That’s actually alarming, given the SPLC’s unique contribution to systemic racism.

Starting in 2015, the SPLC appeared again and again as a source for journalism covering white supremacist movements in US papers of record. It’s not at all an exaggeration to say the SPLC has been ubiquitous from 2015 to the present. For Leftist orgs like It’s Going Down News, the SPLC was a much less tarnished source than the ADL. IGD began relying heavily on the SPLC to validate its analysis of rising hate groups, and, of course, it made sense for IGD to do so. With an underground brand, heavily associated with anarchist groups, IGD may have been trying to provide a bulwark against liberal and centrist responses that would smear the news organization as conspiracy-minded moonbats. But while IGD news was reinforcing the SPLC’s white supremacy research–and even encouraging them to source IGD’s research in their hate reports–the SPLC was busy doing the ideological legwork of institutional white supremacy in the federal government.

The SPLC’s “Black Seperatist” hate map. The category is just one of many in the Hate map pull down menu, and counts toward the growth of ALL hate groups in the SPLC’s math.

Visiting the SPLC’s “hate map” project, is to step through the looking-glass. As I reported elsewhere, the SPLC actually rates the growth of “Black Seperatists”, a hate group flavor of its own invention, as the fastest growing, most pervasive hate group faction. The SPLC’s methodology is laughable even for white supremacist tracking. Historically, Dees has counted self-described “groups”, not individuals or influence, setting artificially high numbers as a way to legitimize the need for the SPLC by always depicting target movements as “growing”. The Black Seperatist/Extremist tracking the SPLC does is no different. Whenever a well-meaning left-wing activist pointed to the SPLC’s tracking methodology and database to prove the need for anti-fascism organizing, they also validated the org’s strange obsession with smearing non-violent Black political organizations, because the tracking for both are methodologically and ideologically unified.

The SPLC’s cheerleading for new ways of criminalizing Black discourse didn’t go unnoticed by more powerful actors. In a report dated August 3, 2017, but not leaked to the public until October, 6, 2017, the FBI described a new terror threat to America–the “Black Identity Extremist”. The neologism rightfully earned the scorn of anti-racists after the leak, but the FBI was not alone in validating this new harrassment-generating profile. The SPLC’s “Intelligence Report” article, “Return of the Violent Black Nationalist”, was also published in August, and reads in many places, like an excerpt from the FBI report. The date on the SPLC piece is August 8, 6 days after the FBI report’s publishing date, but two months before it was first reported to the public via leak by Foreign Policy magazine.

The author of the SPLC piece, Daryl Johnson, is an ex-DHS senior domestic terrorism analyst who has had ties to SPLC for over 5 years. Johnson himself was quoted in the FP article that leaked the FBI report, wondering aloud why the FBI would use such terms. The article failed to divulge Johnson had advanced notions similar to the FBI’s “Black Identity Extremist” under the rubric of “Resurgent Violent Black Nationalists”–and, in an unlikely coincidence, advanced them just when the FBI was internally circulating its similar report.

Ultimately, these coincidences are less surprising when you look at criticism the SPLC racked up before current lucrative and influential periods. Randal Williams, a journalist who briefly worked for SPLC and founded its Klanwatch Project, explained why he left the organization by saying, “We were sharing information with the FBI, the police, undercover agents…we were more of a super snoop outfit, an arm of law enforcement.”

It’s not far-fetched to wonder if Johnson was disseminating ideas in the FBI report for audiences already conditioned to take the SPLC’s proclamations as expert fact, and had to walk them back after FP leaked the original [and as SPLC also attempted to do in its absurdly hair-splitting and dishonest attempt to separate the nearly identical terms and definitions]. Even if, the suggestive timing is, unbelievably, a coincidence, clearly the FBI is reading the SPLC and the ADL, which were cited multiple times in the FBI’s report. One would think all these circumstances would raise serious questions. But surprisingly, none were asked.

Regardless of the origin, the focus on and redefinition of political Black violence have had real-world repercussions, as Foreign Policy later reported. On December 12, 2017, just four months after the SPLC published what was for all intents and purposes an advance copy of the FBI’s report on Black Identity Exremists, Christopher Daniels was arrested on a raft of offenses. According to witnesses, the FBI had been monitoring and surveilling Daniels for at least 2 months, if not longer. As his brother stated: “The [black identity extremist] classification has grown from a report on paper, to a national investigation of Black Lives Matter and and black gun ownership advocates.” Despite at least having played a prominent role in identifying the web of organizations Daniels may have been involved in, the SPLC has not come Johnson’s defense or pushed back against the FBI’s attack on him.

Still, proponents of the validating effect of using SPLC or ADL sourcing might yet argue that organizing and informing around the threat of white supremacy outweighs the damage. Perhaps, if it was true that the alt-right and some additional entrepreneurial white supremacist groups were a much greater concern, than say, the prison or military industrial complexes, and all the mundane liberal evil agencies like the FBI and ATF that support them, they could be right. But the alt-right is all but a thing of the past, and the great bulk of organized white supremacy through the Aryan Brotherhood is ignored by the Left [a choice so laden with class preferences and consumerism that it will require another article to discuss]. Meanwhile, the continued racist slander and targeting abetted by the SPLC and ADL stand to be with us for many years to come thanks to a left-wing enabled soft reboot. What should worry anti-racist activists is that in this rise to legitimacy that was assisted and paralled by that of anti-fascism, it’s not clear who is using who, nor to what ultimate ends.

A few of the people who did the killing in the so-called Manson Family murders.

Many years ago, when people still read whatever was lying around to fight downtime boredom, I picked up and read a discarded copy of the biography of Charles Manson, Manson in His Own Words, by Nuel Emmons. Like almost everyone under 60 today, my knowledge of Manson up to that point came from cultural inheritance of media sensationalism, fictionalized accounts and common mythology. Emmons based the biography on extensive notes from years of interviews with Manson, where he clearly laid out a very believable version of events in which there was no Manson Family, and no mind control cult.

I haven’t thought much of the book or Manson in the meantime. I’ve always assumed based on the “in his own words” narrative, and everything I’ve learned about the way things work in the meantime—especially DA’s offices, corporate media and a lazy public looking for fun stories and easy answers—that Manson was for the most part innocent. I believe the story Emmons told on Manson’s behalf, that he was at best an accessory after the fact who lacked the supernatural powers necessary to compel a squad of young hippies to kill at his whim.

Manson had no reason to lie at this advanced stage of his imprisonment, by then, nearly 20 years with parole ever-unlikely. In fact, it would have been easier for Manson to derive some satisfaction from, and encourage, the image of himself as a superhuman svengali. It was also clear given the self-regenerating life the myth of Manson developed and Manson’s long decline into severe mental illness, he was never going to get out of jail. None of this really concerned me in my day to day, and I barely even noticed when the aged Manson died last week.

Here’s where your bad hot take comes in. In article after article, Manson has been used as a support structure to hold aloft just-so stories about the spectre of the alt-right and neo-nazism. The most widely used play on this theme is Manson as a historical alt-right prototype–with his supposed charisma, organizing power, white supremacist ideology and violence portending the rise of today’s alt-right.

The Forward had one of the most laughable of these formulations, the literal equivalent of watching someone spend 10 minutes pounding a square peg into a round hole.

And yet, in 2017, Manson’s motive and even methods are all too familiar. Think about it: members of Charles Manson’s Family went on their murder spree as a result of Manson’s belief that a race war was imminent. Manson called this war “Helter Skelter,” after the Beatles song. He believed that black people would win the race war against whites, and in the aftermath of Helter Skelter, society would fall into chaos because of black men’s stupidity. Manson and his Family, as the only members of the white master-race to survive, would then reign supreme. The murders were meant to jump-start the race war, since Manson believed that African Americans would naturally be blamed for them.

Sound familiar?

It should. These are the same tactics, minus the mass murder, that are currently deployed by the “alt right.” Indeed, Charles Manson was something of an ideological forefather of today’s “alt right”, which has manipulated counter-cultural currents on the internet, fake news, and racist memes to normalize Nazism, white nationalism and white supremacy.

Manson’s tactics helped popularize some of the white supremacy ideas we’re seeing utilized today by the alt-right, which attempts to use fear and entitlement to position itself as superior to other races.

Baynard Woods takes a few whacks at the premise and creates a comparison to Dylan Roof in this NYT op-ed.

Today, this sort of logic is all too familiar to us. The paranoid, racist and apocalyptic ramblings of Mr. Manson are the DNA of the reactionary alt-right. In the days leading up to Dylann Roof’s murder of nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., he talked to his friends about a “race war” and later used the same language in interviews with investigators. He was an enthusiastic reader of alt-right websites.

All of these hot takes on Manson as historical progenitor of white supremacy, the alt-right, and post-Obama neo-nazis rely on the willing acceptance by the reader of several shaky premises. One, that Manson had a developed white supremacist viewpoint; two, that it was executable; third, that the history of systemic and radical white supremacy begins with Manson.

That Manson held deeply racists beliefs is incontrovertible, but they had little to do with white supremacy. Even spending a few minutes examining Manson’s bizarre and proprietary beliefs around race war, finds it was in counter opposite to most of the values white supremacists hold, which is the elevation of the entire white race, supposedly, not simply lording over the winner in a manipulated global conflict. Without putting too fine a point on it, the goal of white supremacy is the supremacy of white people, obviously.

Certainly, Manson’s idea of a race war was a stark opposite to Roof’s, whose goal was Black genocide. His attack was meant to be a practical example for blood thirsty white supremacists, not some kind of manipulative hat trick. Though it’s not a final say on the issue, the Aryan Brotherhood certainly didn’t think much of Manson’s ideas, as he had to be taken out of general population after nearly being murdered by the group at Folsom State Prison.

The meme that Manson was some sort of proto-Richard Spencer; that his supposed cult was a progenitor of the alt-right; and that his adherents were the old version of the new neo-nazis, spread like wildfire, especially on Twitter. Twitterers were especially fond of silencing any actual examination of Manson’s legacy, never mind his probable innocence. Telling any element of Manson’s biography became normalizing Naziness. Manson became just another data point in that massive jenga, that lucrative and socially empowering concern of 2017, fretting over the rise of self-proclaimed Neo Nazis. There are a lot of examples, of which these are a few:

My views on the antifash fad are no secret. It de facto normalizes systemic white supremacy, occults the way right wing and conservatives use liberal language and rule of law rhetoric to hide their own white supremacy to win over soft racists, invigorates questionable groups like the ADL, and gives way too much discursive power to white people on race. But there is something qualitatively different about the way Manson’s death has been used in these arguments, especially in far left discourse, that I find more dangerous than the ambient daily social media drivel.

The case for Manson’s innocence isn’t very complex. Indeed, the very fact that he didn’t participate in any of the murders itself should lead to questions about whether he received a fair trial and sentence and whether his reputation as a supremely evil figure is warranted. But the case that the state constructed with the help of media is literally beyond belief. Even a cursory perusal of the facts shows the state’s disinterest in logic or even simple physics, a view they seemed to be able to effortlessly transmit to the public.

Though Manson was diagnosed as schizophrenic while incarcerated a few years before the murders, his claims nevertheless make far more sense than the state’s version of them. There was no cult, just a bunch of social drop outs squatting a ranch, fooling around, getting high and committing medium-level crimes together. The murders began when Bobby Beausoleil, a fellow resident, killed Gary Hinman over some drug money, and then sprayed graffiti to blame it on the Black Panthers to keep police off his trail. Others in the group, according to murderers Beausoleil, and Susan Atkins, decided to go on a killing spree to direct police away from Beausoleil. The Manson Family was a creation of the media, fostered by the DA’s office and enthusiastically embellished by the confessed murderers to distract from their role as they tried to get immunity, lower their sentence or avoid the death penalty.

In this, they were egged on by an ambitious Assistant District Attorney. Vincent Bugliosi went on to run for the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office in the very next election the following year on the strength of his spectacular prosecution. He wrote a book just a year after that which earned the ex-civil servant a king’s ransom in his lifetime, after selling over 7 million copies. Bugliosi was a fabulist who should have been laughed out of court. He once claimed Manson caused his watch to stop by simply staring at him. But the public at the time, and today’s nazi-obsessed left and liberals especially, seem eerily vulnerable to his magical thinking.

The Manson Family explanation served the interests of every other actor BUT Manson. The countervailing theory, that Manson was simply an associate of the killers who didn’t influence their acts at all, but may have helped them after the murders, seems pretty sober by comparison. Its a simple explanation which fits with the facts, and doesn’t require magic or telepathy. Two of the murderers, Beausoleil and Atkins, insisted in their trial and in later years that Manson had nothing to do with the murders, did not plan them or direct them. But that has been edited out of the history

With the benefit of hindsight and massive research capacity of today’s internet, certainly one outcome of Manson’s death could have been revisiting the case, and Manson’s supposed guilt in it. Given the impact that the narrative of the murders—hippie commune gone amok—had on counter-cultural ideas, its in fact surprising this didn’t happen. The murders indelibly linked counter-culture and communal living to inevitable madness and mayhem during and after the trials.

Sandi Gibbons a journalist who reported on Manson’s trial, and who now ironically works for the same LA DA’s office that prosecuted the case, encapsulates the impact of the case on counter-culture movements of the time: ”it was the death of the hippie [and commune] movement”. Joan Didion also famously commented, “the sixties ended” on the night of the Tate La Bianca murders. Despite regurgitating the Manson Family mythology, Henry Allen captures the night and day quality that Manson had on the US, from questioning authority to flag decals on car windows.

Though there isn’t a link between today’s right wing movements and Manson’s schizoid rantings, there are echoes of the way Manson was used to smear counter-culture movements that reverberate into the current era. Ironically, one of those echoes, was the right’s attempt to paint “antifa” as the inheritor of the Manson legacy. Its laughable, of course, but reminiscent of the way Manson was used to malign communal living and the sexual revolution.

It’s also worth pointing out that the alt-right/Manson hot-takes rely on erasing Manson’s well-documented mental illness. Manson was first diagnosed as a schizophrenic while incarcerated in 1963. Subsequently, throughout Manson’s entire period of incarceration for the “family” murders, he was professionally evaluated by the California Department of Corrections as having serious schizophrenia, as well as many other disorders, which probably came from a lifetime of imprisonment and isolation.

Even the descriptions of his rants and “philosophy” from supposed followers describe schizophrenic word dissociation as his chief characteristic. There are dozens of professional and anecdotal examples of the fact that Manson’s philosophical or ideological statements were really just neologisms, word salads and incomprehensible language of a schizophrenic. There’s nothing to suggest that Manson is even capable of being a white supremacist, since he seemed unable to hold on to thoughts or ideas from one sentence to the next according to many witnesses, both in the 60’s and since. Most notably, Manson’s schizophrenia and dissociation grew worse in solitary confinement until he was almost unable to communicate coherently in later life–an effect of solitary confinement which anti-carceral activists observe regularly.

Finally, its surprising to see the class differences between the murderers and the man they accused of being their mastermind being so easily ignored by people on the left. Manson was homeless, an ex-con, mentally ill, poor, and practically illiterate. Nevertheless, Bugliosi and mostly affluent killers claim he controlled their minds, even at distances. Surely, the killers had their own interests in mind when they began propagating these stories, but for Bugliosi, the media, mainstream and conservative commenters, there was something more critical at play. The creation of the Manson Family was a convenient way of exculpating white, middle class society of the crime, and putting the guilt squarely on Manson. Manson was given the robes of the hippie movement and was made into a caricature of what conservatives wanted hippies to be—sinister, dishonest, violent, manipulative sociopaths out to corrupt America’s innocent youth. Not surprisingly, when that role was cast, it was given to the one person of the group most powerless to defend himself socially, hadn’t a penny to his name or family to pursue justice on his behalf.

Manson’s story was so easily disseminated and believed , in part, because of the white middle class’s need to put the atrocities committed by their own on someone else. The media were essentially asking: “how could middle class white kids become mass murderers?” Perhaps there were no answers, but Manson, as a representative of the dark side of the hippie movement became a convenient one.

The final irony is that the most crucial lesson about the “Manson Family” period is overlooked today. Groups can be convinced to believe in outright fabrications and blatantly false explanations if it suits their ideology and direct needs. But that’s a lesson that comes not from Charles Manson’s superhuman mind control cult, but from the institutions and public that nurtured and created that enduring myth, and the new generation using it to back up their own questionable interpretations of reality.

**I relied on and was inspired by Carrie Leonetti’s amazing piece on the many problems with the Manson Family trial and social narrative in the Southwestern Law Review throughout this piece.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/11/28/re-your-bad-hot-take-on-charles-manson/feed/2Omooexmanson33333manson 5manson is awful 1Policing History: Peter Nicks’ Ahistorical The Force Erases Context and Facts about OPDhttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/policing-history-peter-nicks-ahistorical-the-force-erases-context-and-facts-about-opd/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/policing-history-peter-nicks-ahistorical-the-force-erases-context-and-facts-about-opd/#commentsSat, 16 Sep 2017 22:44:41 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4772There’s a scene in Peter Nicks the Force, the much hyped documentary by the director of the Waiting Room about the Oakland Police Department that is illustrative of the film’s foundational failure. Then-Captain Leronne Armstrong addresses an incoming police academy. He represents the intsitutional OPD that the young men and women are poised to enter and take on as their own.

Its a moving talk and hits many of the notes that reform–and even abolition–activists would want to see. Armstrong speaks of the history of the OPD unflinchingly, a history that saddled the law enforcement agency with a federal oversight mandate it has yet to complete after nearly two decades, and a reputation for racist violence that still echoes. History; he repeats the word several times throughout the film.

Its ironic, then, that the history of the OPD, its officers and leaders, rarely makes an appearance in Nick’s treatment of Oakland’s police force and city government. To be fair, Nicks stated intention was never one of shining a cleansing beam of daylight into the workings of the police department. His narrative, even before he began rolling, was one of a heroic and youthful next generation of law enforcement cleaning up the remnants of a previous racist, violent past. Its clear in his initial funding blurb:

The Oakland Police Project is a film about police power and restraint, unfolding deep inside the famously troubled Oakland Police Department. The film presents in intimate detail the rare perspective of beleaguered officers who are often viewed as oppressors in the community they serve, even as they and their young chief struggle to rebuild trust in the face of mass protests, budget cuts and more violent crimes per officer than any city in America.

Nicks comforting tale of a “young police chief” leading a “beleaguered” crew of well-meaning cops is the story Nicks obviously meant to tell. And he would have probably gotten away with doing so to a much more saccharine degree than the superficially even-handed narrative that premiered last night at the Grand Lake Theatre if real life hadn’t so spectacularly gotten in the way. According to Nicks, he was instead forced to deviate from his own script when Black Lives Matter exploded nationally, and then the Celeste Guap police rape and pimping scandal broke. But that excuse only occults his own copious disinterest in the merits of recent and distant history of the OPD in favor of the fresh-faced generational narrative he sought to tell.

To anyone who’s followed the exploits of the OPD throughout the last decades, Nicks characterization of the “young” Whent may seem laughable. Of course Whent is young for a police Chief, but its a Dorian Gray sort of youth. Whent had been an Oakland police officer for 20 years–preceeding federal monitoring by 6 years–and he was the previous head of the troubled department’s even more troubled Internal Affairs Division.

One of Whent’s first acts as interim police chief in 2015, was promoting Paul Figueroa to Assistant Chief, despite the fact that Figueroa was implicated in the police violence that nearly killed Occupy Oakland activist Scott Olsen in 2011. When Figueroa took control of the tactical team responsible for the attack on Olsen that night, he was also the head of Internal Affairs, the very agency that would be called on to hold the officers accountable. Thus, Figueroa was doubtlessly also involved in the botched investigation of the incident, as well. Nevertheless, despite the fact that all of this would be great background for evaluating both Whent and Figueroa, who appears briefly in the latter part of the film, no such information is given, either visually or narratively.

The film verites other cops doing heroic work. Frederick Shavies appears early in the film as the very face of beleaguerement, trying to conduct a crime scene with uncooperative residents of the neighborhood. Shavies, of course, is one of the accidental youtube stars Armstrong warns against becoming in his opening speech. Shavies was caught on camera assaulting a journalist for filming police in 2009. Shavies also infiltrated and surveilled Occupy Oakland for the OPD. But Nicks has no interest in that, and we never hear of this history.

The same thing happens when we see interim chief, and ex BART Deputy Police Chief, Ben Fairow, who we are told, is summariliy fired because he may have had a brief affair. The far more disturbing truth about Fairow we never learn from Nicks is that he was the subject of a lawsuit by the wife of Sgt. Tom Smith, a BART cop killed in a friendly-fire incident during a house raid. In the suit, Fairow was said to have called police officers “pussies” and to have fostered an environment where untrained officers were called to potential live-fire situations of the kind that resulted in Smith’s death. This was Schaaf’s first choice for the new OPD that wouldn’t tolerate a frat-house atmosphere after firing Whent, but Nicks leaves it unexamined.

Holmgren’s brief, uneditorialized appearance encapsulates the disturbing choices Nicks consciously made when choosing the focus of his OPD story. In the post-premiere Q&A, at the Grand Lake Theater, Nicks claims to have been wrapping up his filming when the Guap scandal broke. But Nicks was still in production and “embedded” in the police department when Officer Brendan O’Brien took his own life. Nicks had been embedded one year earler as well, after the suspicious death of O’Brien’s wife which was initially investigated as a homicide by OPD. O’Brien’s suicide note where he fingered various OPD officers, eventually broke open the “Celeste Guap scandal”, but the entirety of this chain of events definitely happened under Nicks’ watch.

The Force picks up this thread only after the scandal has “broken” publicly in 2016 [after the intervention of the federal monitor]. There is no mention of the investigation into O’Brien’s death that revealed it, despite Nicks surely having been in a position to at least hear about the suicide and investigation. Later reporting by the East Bay Express revealed that again, Holmgren was at the center of the cover up and intentionally botched the investigation, and that he supervised the intimidation of the young woman at the center of it which resulted in erasing key evidence. Like every other barnacled OPD officer in the documentary, however, Holmgren is no more than a formula character like all of the other tropes in his piece, from Whent to Figueroa, lacking a history or context.

In the face of all this it must be asked, what was documentarian Nicks thinking while O’Brien’s suicide, the suspicious death of O’Brien’s wife and the subsequent mayoral and police cover up of the Guap scandal–all the things he deliberately left out of his film–occurred? Nicks is not shy about the embarrassing answers and seemed to take pride in relating them at the panel following the Grand Lake premiere.

Nicks admitted that the idea for The Force came out of discussions with the city about how to give Open Hood a raison d’etre after the success of The Waiting Room. The result was an offer for unprecedented access to the OPD, but access that seems to have come with an unofficial and/or self-imposed censor.

The construction of the panel in which Nick outlined his pov and analytical position on police violence, was also illustrative of the analysis he brought to the project. Armstrong and OPD Public Affairs Officer Johanna Watson represented the OPD. Ben McBride–the clergyman spotlighted in several vignettes in the film was to represent “the other side” of the argument [and after some back and forth and disruptions, Cat Brooks, of the Anti-Police Terror Project was included].

Nicks admits that his goal in making The Force was to present what he described as the two “emotional sides” of the issue of police racism and violence. As a metaphor for his goals of fostering communication between these “two sides”, he offers an NPR discussion between a parent, a Trump supporter, and daughter, a Sanders supporter. Nicks wants us to hear each other and love each other more, to get past the volatile emotional baggage, to have space for our “difficult, simultaneous truths”.

Its a staggeringly flawed analysis of the way political power works, though it inscrutably received an ovation from the largely white premiere crowd. Of course, the victims of police violence, their neighbors, family and friends approach the issue emotionally, and of course they have their truths–some of which are based in verifiable evidence, some less so. But truth and emotion are exactly what their correspondents in this narrative, the police, do not bring to it.

The police and city are not the pro-Trump parent, expositing their heart-felt if fractured and unreliable “truths”. Though individual police may have truths of their own, and be motivated by emotion [and racism], the OPD as a public institution doesn’t. OPD and its functionaries–like Armstrong and Watson–don’t work in truths, and they are not motivated by emotion.

Public Affairs Officer Johanna Watson’s literal job it is to present official narratives solely created to exonerate and shield officers, the OPD and the city of Oakland. You will never hear Watson’s truth in public. She is paid to say what she has been told to say; messages meant to exculpate officials like Armstrong and the officers who work for him. She is literally paid NOT to tell the truth. She was doing that–getting paid to tell manufactured messages to the audience of the film–right there in front of Nicks

These are the insane fallacies Nicks brought to his work on OPD. The film’s version of history is an object without present context that can be held up and examined by future-present people not implicated in it–but he has the people most implicated in it, the veritable subjects of that history, perform that role. His framing of the police as automatons simply responding to calls, and not actively profiling, stopping, harassing and entrepeneurally creating arrests beggars the imagination–this probably has as much to do with the way he was embedded and allowed to film as the tropes that fit his pre-fab narrative. Finally, his odd idea that violent institutions and the people they subjugate can meet on some equal plane shakes the head at this late date. All these demonstrate a man who should never have contemplated a documentary on a police force, and exactly why he was chosen for the job in the first place.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/09/16/policing-history-peter-nicks-ahistorical-the-force-erases-context-and-facts-about-opd/feed/1Omooex20170915_190605Oakland’s City Leaders as Firestartershttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/oaklands-city-leaders-as-firestarters/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/oaklands-city-leaders-as-firestarters/#respondThu, 17 Aug 2017 19:59:22 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4736On July 7, a massive early morning fire tore through a seven story development in the heart of Oakland’s downtown/uptown neighborhood. It was the second fire this year in a similar construction site–a market rate development in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods–and the third in less than a year. Otis R. Taylor, a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, summed up the prevailing suspicion that a human actor with a political grudge was at work.

“Another fire at another housing project under construction.I’m not the only one who thinks it just can’t be a coincidence.”

Indeed, just hours after the fire, Abel Guillen, the City Council representative for the district, also tweeted his assumption that the fire was politically motivated arson. The belief that recent fires in Oakland were the act of an anti-development, anti-displacement terrorists has been widely speculated since the second fire at the Emeryville-Oakland border. Ten months after the first fire gutted the Holliday Development mixed-use project, a second, apparently started in the same area of the building, gutted the partially reconstructed site.

Both fires are suspected arson, and there is even an apparent suspect in at least one. With yet another fire in another development hot-spot downtown, its not surprising that Oaklanders look to find a rational actor for the unusual fires. Not many locals can remember any period with this many construction fires happening in such short a time frame—the idea of a crusading arsonist vigilante is an explanation appealing in its simplicity and logic.

But whether or not a human actor is responsible, the spate of fires aren’t coincidental or random. Rather they are predictable consequences of corporate and governmental decisions made in the last several years. They all have one causal factor in common responsible for the ease with which the fires started and how quickly they raged.

Massive and uncontrollable fires in construction sites, in fact, have become ubiquitous throughout the US’s rapidly growing cities—Boston had two within one month of each other this year. There was another in Maryland. Outside of the confines of Oakland’s severely limited discourse on the fires, its common knowledge what these factors are. Economic and legal circumstances have caused an industry-wide turn from concrete to cheaper wood-based construction materials for mid-size development up to five floors.

What this means is that there’s less benefit in homing in on a proximate actor, be they politically motivated proto-revolutionaries or thrill-seeking fire-bugs, than getting to the root of the problem—the buildings themselves, which are so easily set alight that no human actor is needed. The attention these fires have gotten has literally advertised to anyone interested in the process of setting fires that there is virtually no chance of getting caught, and that the ATF can’t even determine arson vs. random causes, as the agency recently announced in the Valdez fire downtown. The bar is so low that anyone with a fire fetish can get into the act.

For Oakland’s development crazy Planning Department, Mayor’s Office and City Council, the idea that some masked super-hero is capering from construction site to site setting them alight, a copy of the anarchist cookbook in one pocket and Marx’s Kapital in the other, has conveniently buried conversations happening throughout other US cities about the safety of this new gen of development. Shortly, after the Los Angeles fire of 2014, a site that was also wood constructed and deliberately torched, for example, the city council there began deliberating about whether to allow such construction methods.

This is truly remarkable. All three Oakland fires caused massive, in some cases, permanent displacement. The Emeryville-border blaze ignited homes as far as several blocks away. Miraculously, given the intensity of the fires, no lives have been lost. But, of course, it could have easily gone the other way and may still.

Given the level of development, the density of the uptown and downtown areas where most of it is taking place, and the inordinate use of wood framing materials, it should be incumbent on the City of Oakland to be looking for practical solutions to ending this danger. In fact, the key to stopping these fires doesn’t lie at all in investigations as to the putative actor or cause. The city could stop any possibility of such fires happening with the stroke of a pen from the Planning Department, barring, at least for the time being, all construction with substantial wood framing.

The evidence for doing so would be clear and the arguments against taking such measures are weak. Cost cutting, of course, would be no defense. Every one of these construction site fires in Oakland in the past year has been a market rate—and even luxury apartment—project with wood-frame construction. The cost-cutting measures that make these sites so combustible transfers no benefit at all to residents, not even those who can contemplate the sky-rocketing rents the buildings will charge. The savings are not being transferred to the consumer, the buildings constructed aren’t superior. In fact, there is ample evidence that having the cladding serve as the fire-proofing itself may make the buildings more susceptible to fires even after they are built. There is literally no reason at all to allow construction of buildings with wood-frame methods.

Regardless, in all three instances, despite the obvious contribution of building materials to the scope and intensity of the fires, the city of Oakland then immeidately green-lit the same construction in the exact same sites, including the Valdez location. The next fire in a wood-frame building may not be as forgiving as the last have been. Whether or not someone out there is taking political advantage of the fact that the city is permitting match-stick housing, the next conflagration is squarely on the shoulders of the city leaders who keep green-lighting massive development with dangerous building practices.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/08/17/oaklands-city-leaders-as-firestarters/feed/0Omooexvaldez fireIntersectional Feminism: Wonder Woman, Palestinians, Wakanda and Zionismhttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/intersectional-feminism-wonder-woman-palestinians-wakanda-and-zionism/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/intersectional-feminism-wonder-woman-palestinians-wakanda-and-zionism/#commentsSun, 04 Jun 2017 04:46:35 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4690Though I’m not by any means an expert or anything, I was a historical consultant for one of the better documentaries out there on Wonder Woman, released long before there was even the hint of any hope for a Wonder Woman film—a role I began in 2008 for a film released in 2012. That’s not to validate the opinion that follows here, just to convey the fact that I’ve been thinking about Wonder Woman for quite some time. In fact, even much longer than that. The first “comic trade paperback” I ever read was probably the first publication that could rightly be called such–Gloria Steinem’s collected Golden Age Wonder Woman stories published in a bound volume of comic book-sized dimensions in the 1970s. Steinem considered the 40’s to be the most feminist Wonder Woman iteration, when the comic was still authored by creator, William Moulton Marston.

Marston was an unapologetic visionary quack of the period. He had an open marriage with two women who co-parented his children, he invented a version of the lie detector, he was a not-very closeted bondage fan, he probably believed in Orgones. But Marston also wanted to create an antidote to violent, misogynist superheroes, and I think most people would think he was at least mildly successful in creating Wonder Woman, who used violence sparingly and brought a message of love and harmony to “man’s world”. Yes, there was Etta Candy and questionable spankings, there was unfortunate objectification and stereotyping. But Marston’s vision for Wonder Woman was wonderfully surreal, fun, and proto-feminist.

I remember being a 9 year old boy at the library getting lost in Marston’s absurdist larger than life narraratives and villains, many of whom were misogynist archetypes put in Princess Diana’s way for rhetorical slaying purposes [Dr. Psycho, being my favorite]. I loved Wonder Woman: the way she was drawn at that time, all sinew and modest star-spangled skirt and her just out of the salon coiffure of curly hair that reminded me of my sister. Her reasonable attitude that men were cool as long as they admitted she was their superior. Like many boys, I imagine, and girls, I enjoyed watching the extremely honky Steve Trevor being regularly humbled by her. My favorite Wonder Woman scene of all time, in fact, is the image of Steve Trevor happily breaking a magical device that had imbued him temporarily with superhuman strength surpassing even Diana’s after she flatly told him they could never be together if he was physically stronger than her.

I could go on and on about Wonder Woman, and her many evo and devolutions, the loss of her powers and ambition, the permanent straightening of her curly coiffure. One day I’m going to write the definitive argument that Nuyorican writer/artist George Perez is the only author since Marston who brought the character to life as a feminist icon and underdog with a personal life that revolved around other women, not just Steve Trevor and the sausage factory at the Justice League Satellite. And definitely, Perez knew like I knew that Wonder Woman was a person of color, no matter what Marston imagined. But that’s not what the following piece is about, as you may have guessed.

______________________

I was not one of the people excited to see Wonder Woman brought to the screen. By 2017, the film franchises have made gross joke out of the super heroes they reify in film, so that my common reaction to almost any such announcement is discomfort and boredom. But I did look forward to a mildly entertaining film series. I also understood the cultural impact of having a female super hero burst through the celluloid ceiling after many years sucked into the maw of conventional wisdom about what kind of movies people [a term which for these purposes excludes women and people of color] will watch. Then Gal Gadot was cast in the role.

I have seen very little written about the casting of an avowed Zionist as Wonder Woman, until recently, and even now, there’s precious little commentary about it. I’m saddened to see a narrative franchise I’ve loved from childhood sullied by direct immersion in anti-Palestinian bloodlust, yeah. But this isn’t my first rodeo by a longshot. I’ve lost track of how many times a narrative I’ve enjoyed has found a way to needlessly insert Israel into the mix, and further trumpet the nation’s skill at subjugating Palestinian trolls and goblins. There is often very little narrative logic to including Israelis in a movie or text, it just seems to be something exotic and hyper-martial to add to a story when a writer is in a slump.

The Big Bad Wolf asks Gepetto if he’s heard of Israel. No, I’m not making it up.

The most memorable instance of this dynamic for me, the world-class championship winner of sticking in Israel when there is no conceivable plot necessity was in the comic Fables, about fairy tale characters come to life and living in Manhattan. The absurd way Israel’s excellence at killing Palestinians was woven into a substantive part of that narrative has always astounded me.

But let’s be honest. That speaks more to the dominance of the Zionist narrative in American culture. It’s a barometer of the “good” struggle, machismo, moral certitude and smarmy sentimentality. Israel as the Superman-like Solomon, dispensing unerring just terror from above, is part of the mainstream American ideology in this godforsaken nation of bigots, and I have given up fighting that on a day to day level for sanity’s sake.

So, no, my problem really isn’t just that Gadot is an Israeli, an IDF veteran and an enthusiastic cheerleader for Israel’s habit of “cutting the grass” in Palestine by murdering children and destroying entire cities with missiles. Just like the surprising number of all types of films and texts that portray killing Palestinians as a happy and wonderful thing—things that I often overlook in movies—many of my favorite films are helmed by or star people with horrendous qualities and ideology. I don’t mind Sylvester Stallone for example, or Mel Gibson, and I will literally watch any movie with Tom Cruise in it. The presence of Scarlet Johanson has never prevented me from watching, and being disappointed by, an Avengers movie.

What has bothered me, however, is the uncritical acceptance of the person of Gadot as a feminist icon on the left. My Twitter timeline, for example, is a awash in woke folks experiencing memetic orgasms over Gadot, photos of queer and women cosplay inspired by her characterization in the film, hilarity ensuing over fanboy backlash at women’s only screenings. The almost unified left-wing disinterest in Gadot’s anti-Palestinian warmongering has been a source of frustration obviously. But it’s also been a continuation for me of a disappointing trend that began with the celebration of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ taking over the Black Panther comic.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m uncomfortable even suggesting that women—and especially Black women and men—should have to interrogate their heroes in those rare moments when a Black or female superhero makes it on to screen. I am not trying to establish a checklist that has to be satisfied before you can enjoy a race or gender champion brought to the silver screen. But I think a larger question centers around Zionism’s compatibility with both feminism and Black empowerment. This is a question that is, unfortunately, much more frequently brought up by Zionists who also identify as leftists, who seek to marginalize Pro-Palestinian positions as the square peg in a discourse of liberation.

Recent controversies and articles around the anti-Trump women’s march and the constant criticism of pro-Palestinian positions taken in the course of Black Lives Matters actions stand out as typical of this dynamic. Zionists go on the offensive, asking if its really okay to include Palestinians as members of the fraternity of the colonized and oppressed, since they are all, you know, awful. And, unfortunately, it’s the mainstream left that often leave the opposite argument unspoken, and Zionism’s toxic ideology unexamined when it comes into play over Black and gender discourses and activism. Gadot and Coates are perfect examples in that latter group of Zionist support in the terrain of ideological heavy-lifting comic book characters.

In both cases, Gadot and Coates have been unapologetic and open about their support of anti-Palestinian violence. During Operation Protective Edge, Gadot, just cast as Wonder Woman, used her new platform to defend direct attacks on civilians, including women and children. Gadot celebrated Israeli propaganda that every such casualty was Hamas’ fault for storing weapons close to them in the most densely populated open-air prison camp on earth. The most frustrating thing to me is how obviously this invalidates Gadot as a feminist icon, and Wonder Woman as well, when the character is brought to life by Gadot. If gender is shared by all racial groups, feminism cannot be Zionist, just as it cannot be neo-Nazi—feminism that doesn’t have an understanding of how it intersects with racial and ethnic oppression is simply a diversification of white supremacy.

Again, this is not a commentary on the value of the narrative behind Gadot’s Wonder Woman or Coates’ Black Panther, nor Gadot’s acting prowess, or the strength of Coates’ observations about the Black experience of US oppression. Instead, it’s an open question about whether its possible to support Zionism while also proposing useful iterations of feminism and racial justice.

Is it possible to openly call for the death of women in a neighboring state, to support a political and economic regime that without a doubt contributes to their subjugation both at the hands of Israel, and in Palestinian society, and still be a feminist? And can one use the funding of European colonialism in historical Palestine as a viable blueprint for African-American reparations and not lose something inherent to racial justice in the process? This is more than just an issue of being ignorant to intersectionality, because the leftwing audience I am talking about is comfortable and familiar with ideas around intersectionality. I guess I’m asking if Palestinians even rate high enough on the scale of human beings to be seen as worthy of intersecting with. So far, from what I’m seeing, I don’t like the answer.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/06/03/intersectional-feminism-wonder-woman-palestinians-wakanda-and-zionism/feed/13Omooex9780811842334-us-300black panther coatesgadot......Please Stop Using the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Data, Guise.https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/please-stop-using-the-southern-poverty-law-centers-data-guise/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/please-stop-using-the-southern-poverty-law-centers-data-guise/#commentsSun, 28 May 2017 22:32:29 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4613Many people who care what I think will have noticed I have little regard for Antifa. I also don’t subscribe to the prevalent ideological construct of white supremacy growing astronomically in a substrate of the alt-right.

I think there may be a slight growth in white supremacist affiliation, and a definite spike in brazen public declarations of proud bigotry in the US. My problem with the alt-right and antifa formulation is just that–the alt-right antifa industrial complex has both groups, which emerge from the same race and economic class feeding off each other, burnishing each other’s reputation, and most critically, from my pov, making each other the focal point for the examination of white supremacy and its negation.

This construct ignores generations of study and experience about the very mainstream realities around white supremacy in the US: that its well tolerated by liberal as well as so-called conservative audiences; that its toxic effects are most often a product of local and federal laws that have nothing to do with race; and that in a capitalist economy such as ours, economic acts are the primary theater where white supremacy flourishes.

Putting all that aside for a moment, because everyone I know already hates me for bringing this stuff up, I have to note that antifa discourse, and many anti-racist normative liberal perspectives, orbit around the declarations of the Southern Poverty Law Center. This go-to-itiveness the SPLC holds over the left is what I’m concerned about in this brief argument for consigning the org forever to the cornfield.

I sympathize with the problem of trying to find the numbers to defend arguments based on ideas that white supremacy is growing–because in a white supremacist society, any organization focused on recording and analyzing such stats is going to be bound by the public acceptance of what white supremacy is at any given time and let’s not even talk about funders.

But the SPLC’s categorization and analysis of hate groups in the US is beyond any flaws you’d imagine resulting from these issues. The flaccid and silly characterizations SPLC uses for its analysis are a product of the capricious ideas of the org’s founder and its director. For example, the SPLC’s “hate map” and the data that inhabit it are used often to argue there has been recent growth of white supremacist groups. Here is the graph that accompanies the Hate Map on SPLC’s website, that shows a definite growth according to the SPLC’s rubric, in racist groups:

More striking is the SPLC’s “Hate Map. This is the map at the “All States, All Groups” setting.

Prett scary. Of course, people who will use this data set to make their argument, rarely click the drop-down menu that breaks the map down into sections of hate which are solely the SPLC’s intellectual product. One interesting thing that happens when you do that–let’s say, when you click on the fanciful “Black Seperatist” flavor of hate groups–is you get brow-furrowing results. I call these Sudden Weird Outcomes, or SWO’s, a term I have coined to describe SPLC’s jenga-like data constructs.

Here we see that the 1/5th all of SPLC’s hate groups in the United States are “Black Seperatist” groups and that these are instutionally powerless orgs whose main work is discursive and legally-approved protest like the Nation of Islam and the Black Panthers–the kind of organizations any ‘civil-society’ math would dictate you need to create a robust conversation about Black liberation.

Here’s the SPLC’s really rigorous methodology for defining and including Black Seperatist groups in the SPLC’s analysis of hate groups in the US.

This is specious reasoning. And, of course, these statements are clearly up for analysis themselves. Gauging Black groups, even if they espouse violence, as racist, shows a very narrow understanding of race and whiteness in the US. So its suprising to see the authors so boldly asserting what can only be seen as controversial ideas, themselves immersed in the mainstream white supremacy of the US.

Beyond this, using SPLC’s data in the way that they are intended to be used creates tons of SWOs. According to SPLC, there are more Black Separatist groups in California, than either White Supremacist or Neo-Nazi groups, a ratio that holds for the entire country’s data sets.

And if this is true, its clear that the biggest threat to the average Californian is the growth of Black separatist groups–which according to the magic of whatever-I-say-at-my-own-ngo–has increased by 10% since 2015. Obviously, if the increase of Black Seperatist groups in the US has grown 10% in the last year, then the total growth in hate groups according to SPLC in the US, is driven in no small part by Black racism, a laughable theory.

]]>https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/05/28/please-stop-using-the-southern-poverty-law-centers-data-guise/feed/1Omooexincrease in hate groupshate map all states all groupsblack seperatist groupsblack seperatist reportcali black sep groupsA Tale of Two Oaklands: The Ghostship Fire, The San Pablo Apartments Fire, and the Fight for Oakland’s Heart and Soulhttps://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/a-tale-of-two-oaklands-the-ghostship-fire-the-san-pablo-apartments-fire-and-the-fight-for-oaklands-heart-and-soul/
https://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/a-tale-of-two-oaklands-the-ghostship-fire-the-san-pablo-apartments-fire-and-the-fight-for-oaklands-heart-and-soul/#respondFri, 21 Apr 2017 03:09:01 +0000http://hyphenatedrepublic.wordpress.com/?p=4518 Dozens of reporters, videographers and photographers thronged around the yellow tape surrounding the block containing the Ghost Ship warehouse the morning after the tragic fire that killed 36 people in the center of Fruitvale. As the hour approached noon, a group of thousands of Latino Catholics began their scheduled annual procession for the Virgen de Guadalupe from St. Elizabeth’s Church, one of the largest Latino Catholic parishes in the Bay Area, located just three short blocks away from the site of the fire. Their normal route for the yearly march from the church to the Diocese headquarters in downtown Oakland is down the length of International Boulevard until it rebounds off of Lake Merritt.

But on that morning, the procession was forced to reroute to 12th street, as the city of Oakland had shut down International Blvd for the three square blocks from Fruitvale to Derby St. The procession seemed never-ending, and the street was teeming with people. They were all Latinos, as the Fruitvale and San Antonio districts have for generations been an eclectic mix of Central American, Mexican and African-American communities. Sunday is a big community day around the church, where during any scheduled service, the crowd is standing room only, with even the vestibules full of parishioners.

That Sunday, the day after the fire, wave after wave of the procession curved around the yellow hazard tape, and onto 12th Street, but journalists and photographers alike shrugged at the spectacle. Nothing about the procession: its existence, its character, its juxtaposition with the disaster nor, most importantly, the fact that thousands of community members were available for comment, attracted the attention of the media.

The Caminata de la Virgen de Guadalupe, an annual event of St. Elizabeth’s Church, snakes past the police cordon of the Ghost Ship fire on Sunday, December 3, 2016.

This same lack of interest in the community was reflected in the way the city of Oakland handled its official disaster and clean-up operations in the aftermath of the fire. For over a week after the fire, the city kept the section of International Boulevard around the wreck of the Ghostship closed off. In the first few days, as damage assessment and recovery operations occurred, this was an arguably reasonable decision, especially in view of how critical it was to provide information for the families involved. But after there was any legitimate excuse, city officials kept this portion of the street at the intersection of Fruitvale Avenue and International Boulevard—a main artery for the busy neighborhood—closed because they had transformed it into their public relations stage.

City, police and fire administrators gave updates and press conferences from the small stage they had constructed so that the Ghostship ruin would be visible in the background as they gave updates and speeches to the growing body of local and national media reporters. The rest of the blockaded area was reserved for mobile satellite link trailers, news van and reporter parking. The official media pen became a fixture of the blockade for its duration of ten days, blocking off access to residences and businesses alike, as well as the local low-income clinic, Native American Health Center, which had to temporarily relocate some of its operations for the entire period to another one of its buildings outside of the media scrum further down International.

The city’s media stage in the penned off area of International Boulevard.

Media vehicles and satellite trucks parked in the penned off area around International Boulevard, mostly used as a parking lot and media stage for the fire spectacle.

Certainly, none of these things may have carried more import than the unfolding details of the awful disaster that engulfed the off-the-books venue and residence at Ghost Ship at the time. But the early establishment of an almost contemptuous universal disinterest in the the neighborhood residents became the template for the subsequent politicization of the disaster, and it was not one that was easily changed in the months that followed.

Some good local reporting focused on the hobbling of normative city services in order to continue inflating its public safety budgetary partner, the Oakland Police Department. Subsequent records and whistle blowing revealed a Potemkin fire department facing a myriad of serious failures—absent and powerless chiefs and officials, flagrant bypassing of protocols, and questionable budgetary expenses. The OFD failed at its minimal fire prevention due diligence–even in the wealthy Oakland Hills area, a fact made even more alarming by the city’s hesitance and near-illegal attempts to keep the records from going public. But an overwhelming lurid focus on the personal life of Derrick Almena—the master tenant and designated villain of the media narrative—made such reporting difficult to find, especially in national papers of record.

Where substantive reporting on the politics of public safety was rare, there was almost no reporting at all about the brick and mortar community in which the disaster occurred. It was as if the Ghostship had existed on a floating island, connected to the affluent communities laying emotional and thematic claim to it by magical escalators placed around the city everywhere but Fruitvale and San Antonio. While the conspicuous absence of Black and Brown voices from the neighborhood should have been a red flag of the ongoing displacement of Oakland’s historic communities and their eclipse from the Oakland narrative, no such thing occurred. Rather, discussions about gentrification and displacement appeared frequently in reporting about the fire and its impact, and in the city’s rhetoric and response, but they were focused on fears of displacement of the self-proclaimed “warehouse and live-work” community, not the physical community where the fire occurred. [This offensive Guardian piece is probably the best synthesis of the distillation of gentrification as an issue primarily of artists, the most vital Oakland demographic].

Somewhere along the way, gentrification and displacement had become boutique processes confined to the Oakland community of artists, not the communities where these groups’ lifestyle and habitus often jump-started processes that displaced historical low-income and of-color communities. Affluent new-comers had become the famous Black city’s heart and soul, and the favored protagonists in it’s housing crisis. The indifference toward overwhelmingly Black and Brown population that live in the neighborhood around Ghostship, and the hyper-focus on live-work and warehouse spaces would come to influence policy focus and choices about housing and housing safety in city agencies and government and would echo throughout the mainstream media discourse about the fire for months to come.

II. The Live-Work Heart and Soul of New Oakland

The replacement of Oakland from a historic Black and Brown mecca to a new construct as DIY and artist epicenter began over a decade ago as a spillover effect from San Francisco’s rampaging rents and increasing affluence. It was a logical process. Artists who had colonized San Francisco’s warehouses and industrial buildings naturally fled to Oakland with its then-cheap rents and absent building-code enforcement. The spaces proliferated and Oakland soon gained a reputation for being an off-grid city full of the kind of urban playgrounds attracting young affluent demographics to places like Brooklyn and Portland.

Oakland’s rebranding of itself as a reserve-San Francisco, the new Brooklyn, and the Burning Man headquarters with cheaper and more plentiful live-work spaces was in large part responsible for the accelerated gentrification of Oakland’s downtown—rechristened Uptown–and the subsequently enfranchised sideshow known as Oakland First Fridays. The city officially used the latter for marketing and relied on it as a major draw for tourism and development dollars.

None of this was lost on Mayor Libby Schaaf, who, as a city council person was vocal proponent of the warehouse/arts scene. Her partnership with the founder of high-profile, live-work giant American Steel to create “the Uptown Art Park” highlights how Oakland’s political class came together with a nascent community of well-heeled makers to create a new concept of public art and space and the rebranding of at-risk, and gentrifying spaces as civic goods.

The site of the Uptown Art Park was an empty lot in the heart of downtown Oakland’s former commercial district, miles from Schaaf’s ostensible area of work, affluent district 4. Nevertheless, Schaaf helped the founder of American Steel, Karen Cusolito, propose the “art park” to the city council, and gather facilitation and funding for it. This was no forgotten corner of Oakland, as it was often characterized by Schaaf and Cusolito, however—the block or so surrounding the lot was steeped in Oakland’s gentrification history. The Westerner, an SRO in Oakland’s dwindling cache of housing of last resort, was sold and demolished and the Uptown apartments that surround the lot constructed there a decade earlier.

In 2012, community activists with the help of Occupy Oakland had staged a political action at the lot, taking it over as the new site for the defunct Occupy encampment and using it discursively to highlight the displacement of the area’s previous historic Black communities and the related mounting problem of homelessness. The action was short-lived, with OPD raiding and ejecting the camp the next morning.

Cusolito and Schaaf’s new plans for the lot erased the political and social history of the area. Affluent entrepreneurial newcomers like Cusolito became—in Schaaf’s own words—the legitimate “activists” and the pubic-private art partnership as a “magical example of citizen advocacy”. Gone was the critique of ongoing gentrification in the creation of “Uptown”; rather the real problem as proposed by Steven Huss, an Oakland city government cheerleader for Oakland’s DIY-based arts district and Cusolito, was a space unused for the benefits of the arts community. This was a new equation, with well-heeled artists as Oakland’s legitimate resident, the city’s flagging industrial base as their manifest destiny, and emerging politicos interested in development as their natural patrons. That’s exactly how the National Endowment for the Arts, a funder of the “art park” described Oakland and the “community” that demanded and secured the art park:

Oakland saw a surge of new artist residents when the dot-com boom brought skyrocketing housing costs to the region. Today the city boasts of having one of the highest populations of artists per capita in the nation. Already home to many artistic and industrial fabricators, Oakland became home to a burgeoning community of industrial artists, and today a high percentage of the large-scale interactive artworks shown at the annual Burning Man festival in the Nevada desert are fabricated in Oakland.

Schaaf’s subsequent mayoral campaign advertised a full week of inaugural festivities with “Made in Oakland” as its theme, she held her inaugural party at American Steel, which her campaign called “a playground for artists and innovators” and a celebration of the “artistry and maker-spirit of Oakland”. Later, she convened the Artist Housing and Workspace Taskforce in 2015, with a mandate to explore methods of keeping Oakland affordable for artists including the city’s purchase of housing in land trust specifically for self-identified makers.

Oakland’s reinvention as a city of artistic newcomers gilded the the disappearance of 33,000 African-Americans from Oakland’s geographic and cultural landscape—nearly 25% of its historic population. The city’s long-standing reputation as a Black political and ultural mecca began to fade. As Assata Olugbala, a retired educator, and frequent commenter at Oakland city council meetings noted at a public forum on the Ghostship fire in January, Black people, the true “heart and soul” of Oakland were being erased, over-written by newly arrived artists and artisans eager to adopt and claim Oakland as their own construct. And city government and agencies were clearly encouraging and servicing them.

As a conspicuous example, Olugbala lamented, city governments had failed for 14 years to hold the Oakland police accountable to their federal consent decree and fight police violence against Black communities—but this regularly generated little concern in city hall. In just one short month, as she noted, the city council had rushed to address all the concerns of the live-work and artist groups. Oakland’s artists had not only become the favored child of the establishment but the new cultural face of Oakland, with all the privileges that status suggested.

III. Sanctioned and Unsanctioned Speakeasies:

Thus, its not much of a surprise that artist venues and spaces avoided official OFD scrutiny and OPD policing. In its four years of operation, the Ghostship venue was no exception, and perhaps even an extreme case of official indifference to normatively illegal activity. Police reports that emerged after the Ghost Ship fire revealed that the off the books nightclub operated with the full knowledge of the OPD and city alike. One report describes an OPD officer who responded to neighbor’s complaints of noise being turned away by the doorman and simply leaving. Other reports by OPD describe a “24 hour” art gallery, a rave club and artist warehouse. OPD knew that the space was being used illegally in a myriad of ways and did nothing.

OPD’s laizze faire attitude toward the Ghostship stands in sharp relief to its rubric for other residents in Fruitvale and San Antonio who try to run their own unpermitted culture and entertainment businesses in disused converted warehouses and storefronts in this part of Oakland. Several weeks after the Ghostship fire, the Alameda County Sheriff sent an armed SWAT team to arrest and evict group living and working in a storefront a mile or so from the Ghostship fire. According to the Alameda County Sheriff, the group was running an off the books party venue in East Oakland where gambling and drug use were allegedly occurring.

The ALCO Sheriff claimed to raid the space as a safety precaution inspired by the Ghost Ship tragedy. But its clear that quick violent, carceral action has been the boilerplate response by law enforcement for Oakland’s “other” live-work spaces for years. The criminialization of off-grid venues run by Black and Brown Oakland residents is a regular part of life in East Oakland. In 2015, for example, several blocks from the Ghost Ship in the “Dubs” area of International Boulevard, an underground storefront speakeasy was shut down shortly after it began operating—the police claimed that gambling and drug-use and drinking were occurring at the site, unlawful conduct by Black and Brown historical residents that the city could not market to affluent newcomers. Another illegal gambling spot—described by law enforcement as a casino–was shut down not far from Fruitvale BART on a similar pretext around the same time, scant months after it began operating.

The concerns that prompted the raids aren’t to be found in the criminal code or public safety rubrics, despite the claims of OPD and local authorities. Public police records released after the fire show that OPD were regularly called to the Ghostship with complaints of firearm threats, assaults and thefts and open illegal drug sales. The calls came from within the Ghostship collective from neighbors and neighboring businesses. In terms of the potential for violence, even lethal violence, and harm to the surrounding community, Ghostship posed no less an ostensible threat than unsanctioned venues run by and for Black and Brown community residents. In hindsight, of course, the larger attendance and structural requirements of activities in Ghostship, made it a much graver threat to public safety as the city came to unfortunately discover. The real difference in official response was not one of public safety–its that the other venues mentioned here were operated and frequented by people of color from the neighborhood.

IV. Misunderstood Lessons and Unheeded Warnings.

Not surprisingly, despite dozens of anecdotal tales of artists suddenly being evicted from their spaces by city planning or the Oakland Fire Department, nothing of the sort happened. The die was already cast, however. The narrative of a community of embattled warehouse residents facing stringent and unfair enforcement of code became the dominant legacy of the Ghost Ship fire, politicizing the tragedy and the mourning that followed in ways that in hindsight make little sense.

The Ghost Ship was an atypical live-work space, crammed from top to bottom with extremely unsafe fixtures and decorations. It was a functional nightclub with well-publicized shows that drew tourists and others from all around the Bay Area. As many observed, given its regular use as a public venue for profit, its lack of exits, the large amount of flammable material, and bad management, Ghost Ship was a tragedy waiting to happen. The live-work space was uniquely dangerous in the context of Oakland’s off the books venue scene.

The popular narrative grew a life of its own, however, and bypassed more obvious takeaways from the fire. Three significant tropes became the immutable template for the city’s response, media reporting, and statements by self-proclaimed artists and live-work residents themselves. The first, and perhaps most key, was the definition of the community affected by the fire. This community was rarely defined in geographic terms, i.e., the adjacent brick and mortar businesses, and dwellings and people who lived and worked in them—working class people of color with long-standing cultural roots in the community. Rather, the community affected by the Ghost Ship fire was ethereal and amorphous, typically populated by white newcomers to Oakland—many from affluent or middle class backgrounds.

The voices of this community gained further privilege through the moral gravity and national spectacle of the Ghostship fire and they were given carte blanc on the stages of government to craft the second and third tropes. Usurping the role of Oakland’s displaced, they insisted that this community had been forced by the urgencies of the housing market to live in dangerous warehouses. In turn, for this reason, the live-work community needed focused institutional support to rehabilitate their last-resort living situations. Then they claimed that instead of such support, city agencies were preparing to aid in their eviction and displacement.

These twin beliefs spawned several fundraisers and benefits to increase safety in existing live-work spaces, and to bring sites up to code for the predicted storm of enforcement. Over a million dollars were officially raised by independent crowd-sourcing for the victims of the fire. But additional funds were raised for people had nothing at all to do with the fire, but lived in supposedly similar conditions to fund DIY repairs and upgrades of existing rented live-work spaces.

The welfare of the surrounding community that the Ghostship fire occurred in never entered into the discourse—not about housing of last-resort, not about fire-safety, and certainly not as the subject for fund-raising. The businesses in the adjacent building to the Ghost Ship venue were immediately closed in the aftermath of the fire, and within a week were yellow-tagged—basically shut down for business. One owner who I spoke to, who wanted to remain anonymous, told me that no one had ever approached her about fundraising for their shuttered businesses, and that they had, to date, received no funds from any source.

Yellow Tags on businesses in building adjacent to Ghost Ship mean that the site can’t do business indefinitely.

Sign on a business around the corner from Ghostship that was damaged in the fire: “Pardon us for the events, Unfortunately we are not able to open. Please call for more information:”

La Moda photographed in March, 2017, liquidating its inventory in sidewalk sales because it can’t do business in a yellow tagged store.

As I looked at the collapsing, water-damaged ceiling and the water-damaged furniture and display cases, they told me the city had offered them a loan, which they would have little hope of paying back given the damage their livelihood. The last surviving business adjacent to the Ghostship, La Moda, a woman’s clothing and fashion with its Spanish-language signs and ads, was forced to liquidate its inventory via sidewalk sales in front of the shuttered business in April. But there were no human interest stories about the loss of these businesses, and, to this day, no fundraisers.

Nevertheless, the mythology about a besieged community of artists consequently generated a political movement. A consortium of live-work residents created several “artist” coalitions in the subsequent weeks, that followed the fire. The most prominent, the Oakland Warehouse Coalition, garnered an extraordinary amount of influence and attention immediately from City Council officials and the mayor herself.

The immediate and focused response was an extraordinary action by a Mayor and city council to ameliorate such a small and relatively new group. In public meetings, members of the OWC often seemed to be working as partners with Rebecca Kaplan’s aides to consolidate items on the docket for future consideration by the city council. They were treated as stakeholders, literally as a city agency of their own, with the director of the OWC addressing the committee without a speaker’s card. As a testament to the importance of seeming to focus on the welfare of this constituency, Mayor Schaaf issued an executive order around live-work fire codes within one month of the fire.

V. Lost Opportunities

Some argued that the focus, any focus, on housing in the current wildfire of displacement and sky-rocketing rents in Oakland was beneficial. And its true that the fire gave councilperson Kaplan an opportunity to revive a revamped red-tag relocation ordinance that had sat idly in the community and economic development committee for over a year. But the quality and substance of the city’s responses were affected by its never-ending focus on the self-identified artist community in a way that warped Oakland’s long-standing issues around poverty, racism, displacement and increasing gentrification.

Warehouses and industrial sites made into live-work spaces by newly arrived artists are, in Oakland’s vast terrain of off-the-books residences, a tiny minority. The disinterest in existing of-color, struggling Oakland communities erased the reality that they live in hotwired and unofficial domiciles—garages, inlaw units, sheds, basements and unpermitted additions. Such units are not a lifestyle companion to a cultural milieu. In many cases, last-resort dwellings of this type may be the only way working class and poor people have remained in their Oakland communities, where official units require capital, contracts and established credit.

Even normative housing legislation isn’t enough to ameliorate these living situations. Shifting from one dangerous unpermitted unit to another, with, for example, Kaplan’s increased red-tag relocation legislation, is not a guarantee—Oakland’s poor and poorly housed hold on to bad living situations of their own accord because there are few options available even with the funds to do so.

And, of course, fire safety is by no means the only concern in such sub-standard housing. Fruitvale’s epidemic proportion of building-sourced lead contamination—with up to 7% of children exposed—made national news for a day or two around the same time, but with the exception of some busy work by city council members, was soon forgotten in the rush to tend to the Ghostship aftermath. The focus on policing of building safety remained on tenants; lacking established and regular city action to force landlords into compliance, a disproportionate responsibility is on those who have the most to lose.

The city did little to focus the post-Ghostship energy into substantive changes to the city’s degraded code inspection regimes and the toxic sub-standard housing Oakland’s dwindling Black and Brown population were increasingly forced to live in—a reality that would soon become horrifyingly apparent.

VI. Predictable Outcomes

Oakland government’s rush to flatter a small influential demographic had predictable outcomes, and they became clear in a serious fire a few months later in gentrifying West Oakland which destroyed an SRO-like transitional housing building. Four residents were killed in early morning hours in the apartments located in a gentrifying West Oakland neighborhood on San Pablo Avenue, and at least 80 were displaced.

The city’s newly revamped relocation legislation was probably the only sober and useful tool for such a fire, as it improved on existing legislation that provided funds for displaced tenants to later recoup the funds via liens placed on the properties of the landlord. But the necessity of performing its quick passage as engagement with live-work residents masked the fact that the city hadn’t allocated the funds to cover so many precariously housed renters in a city as large as Oakland. What should have been a clarion call to prepare for the relocation of dozens, if not hundreds of poor and working class tenants in the event of another fire of equal magnitude in a large apartment building, went unheeded.

Weeks after the San Pablo fire, it was revealed that the city had still not charged the relocation fund, while victims of the fire waited without answers, and some had become homeless. Relocation funds had not been a pressing issue for the few displaced tenants of the Ghostship months earlier; they had personal resources on top of tens of thousands of dollars from various fundraisers. There was no need to perform due diligence for that audience about where the money for the fund would come from in the future, and so no move was made to make sure the money would be ready in the case of another disaster(s) involving more resident survivors with fewer resources. The passage of the ordinance at the time was seen as a hard-won concession by the live-work community, and a victory of the OWC campaign.

It was later revealed that the relocation fund only had about $150,000 at the time of the San Pablo fire, months after it had been retooled.

Eventually, council-members performed a byzantine transfer of funds in a council session in mid-April, taking $600,000 from an unrelated housing program to fill the fund for displaced San Pablo Avenue residents. Though the city had waited an astonishing three weeks before taking action, it now has no ready source of funding for relocation for a future emergency of similar magnitude—after these relocation payouts the fund will drop to zero. There are more problems. Relocation amounts are calculated by units, not necessarily by the number of people living in them—another weakness caused by an inaccurate assessment of the conditions experienced by residents of sub-standard units. This may create future problems for adequately addressing displacement of these and future precariously housed residents.

A single-minded focus on protecting the residency rights of self-identified artists was a reversal of the logic that prompted building fire codes and fire inspections—as ways of protecting socially vulnerable poor and poor people of color forced to live in sub-standard housing. That focus also blurred the code enforcement department’s struggle with competency and efficacy through the years. As the East Bay Express reported months later, policy for a city apparatus that would create pro-active building code enforcement coupled with rigorous renter protections to keep people in their homes or in parallel housing had been recommended in numerous housing reports provided to the city. But even when a proposal to create a taskforce to hammer out a system that would preserve residency and hold landlords accountable entered into the city council’s agenda last year, it was frozen in committee.

Though the Ghostship fire would have been an opportunity for reviving the proactive policy proposal with added support, staff and funding, it was never even discussed—in forums, in city council meeting after meeting, no councilperson brought it up, nor did the warehouse advocates. Rather, the focus remained on sculpting a code enforcement profile that would maintain the right of newly arrived residents to live in exactly the kind of social and structural mis en scene they desired—a right that they seemed to claim in statement after statement was derived from their single-handed role in creating Oakland’s culture. This deviated the conversation away from stronger code enforcement and protections for the historic residents in the kind of domiciles they live in. Issues of poverty and racism rarely entered into the conversation, which was invariably about the right of enterprising live-work artists to invest significant funds into tweaking their own undocumented residences.

The bill for passing on those policy opportunities had come due much earlier than anyone may have anticipated in the form of the San Pablo Avenue fire. In contrast to the city’s kinetic response to the Ghostship disaster, initial response to the San Pablo fire was ponderous. For most of the following day, Mayor Schaaf occupied the public stage in tit for tats over the fruitless Oakland Raiders negotiations and didn’t mention the fire publicly. There was no on-site stage for round the clock press conferences, and there was no vast migration of the nation’s news media. The surviving residents, numbering more than 80, were crammed into a youth center, where they spent over a week sleeping on cots, because there are so few low-income housing and SRO buildings left in Oakland to relocate them to in Oakland’s gentrified landscape. Despite the obvious implications of Ghostship, Oakland had no designated emergency shelter put in place and still doesn’t.

It also became evident that the non profit running the transitional housing in Kim’s building had a checkered past and odd practices. In the vacuum of adequate low-income housing, actors with questionable intentions had appeared to either exploit the crisis or fail miserably at providing safe housing due to their lack of capacity.

The San Pablo fire became a public stage where Oakland’s age-old institutional priorities guided by institutional racism and the inescapable logic of gentrification played out. The city’s corrupt and incompetent code enforcement failed Oakland’s most vulnerable. The San Pablo building’s residents were nearly 100% African American, the same demographic that had experienced an almost complete loss of available low-income housing and forced exodus during Oakland’s live-work renaissance. The city’s ho hum response to crisis involving the city’s Black heart and soul—the very reason OPD was still in federal stewardship after 14 years, as Olugbala noted—was in full view.

Oakland’s artists, who are mostly white, fared well by contrast. The alarming scenario that pro-warehouse proponents painted, never came to be. Local media reported that there were only 4 red-tagged buildings city wide in the months following the Ghostship fire, somewhat less than the same period a year earlier. Two of those were storm-damaged houses in the hills. Only one ostensible live-work building was red-tagged, but that was because a fire gutted it a few weeks after the Ghostship disaster. In fact, the city red-tagged only one-building for non-disaster related habitability or fire code violations–the storefront mentioned earlier raided by the police and used by mostly Black and Brown Oaklanders.

In an impoverished conversation about fire-safety and livability, the city and warehouse advocates patted themselves on the back. They had created the problem and the solution, and it didn’t matter that they’d failed to address the daunting issues of sub-standard housing and renters protections that the moment called for.

Weeks later, the San Pablo fire has engendered no public forums, no raucous city council meetings–a handful of speakers appeared to speak at the city council vote on the increase in relocation funds on April 18, 2017, and most were victims of the fire or their family and friends. The one-hundred or so African-American fire survivors have moved to various other sites, according to local reports, dispersed through the city in precarious, often temporary housing. Some are homeless; some who had mental health needs, are lost to the streets. Mayor Schaaf has stated that she will hire more inspectors, but no council person has taken it upon themselves to introduce legislation to protect residents nor to guarantee that there is a rigorous increase in inspections. Having swept San Pablo under the carpet with additional 600k infusion to the relocation fund, the city says done and done.

Meanwhile, La Moda, the last surviving business adjacent to the wreck of the Ghostship puts on sidewalk sales by the sound of a gas generator as the owners try to liquidate their stock before letting go of their business. The Botanica, which had been there for years, and was a material part of the religious culture of the area, irreplaceable, is gone without forwarding address. The site of the fire has become a tourist attraction, conveniently located close to BART, with small crowds regularly taking selfies of their pilgrimage.

No one knows what will become of the nearly block-long series of structures, though they will probably be converted to market rate housing as soon as its feasible to do so. As of this date, victims of the San Pablo fire have still not received their relocation funds, although the city administrator claims the checks will be cut by the end of April. Fruitvale’s decades-old toxic lead contamination continues. The city council failed to introduce legislation to address Fruitvale’s lead problem when the issue made national headlines, and proposed policies seem to have died in committee. It makes no difference to Oakland’s new heart and soul, which have moved on regardless.

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